Presentation from Manuel Castro (UNED) at the Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education 2014 conference in Jacksonville (FL)

1. Combining Remote Laboratories and
Massive Open Online Courses
(MOOCs) for Teaching Electronics
Manuel Castro, Mohamed Tawfik, Felix Garcia-Loro, Elio Sancristobal,
Francisco Mur and Gabriel Diaz
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department
Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED)

2. Presentation Structure
 Introduction to MOOCs
 Introduction to VISIR
 World’s 1st remote lab-based MOOC
 MOOC meets MOOL
 Implementation and Results

3.  Extending the concepts of OCW, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) was
originated in 2008 within the OER movement. MOOCs are open online courses
that are more structured formal and aiming at large-scale interactive participation.
Only a few percent of the tens of thousands of students who may sign up
complete the course. Typically they do not offer academic credit or charge tuition
fees but in some cases they offer the possibility of earning academic credit or
certificates based on supervised examinations
 Subsequently, several providers by elite universities have emerged such as edX,
which was founded by MIT and Harvard University. New commercial start-ups
such as Coursera and Udacity have also been launched in collaboration with
prestigious universities, offering online courses either for free, charging or only
charging a small fee for the final certification. Other open education initiatives
have been around such as Udemy, P2PU and Khan Academy

4.  Different ideologies have driven MOOCs in two different pedagogical directions:
1. The earlier connectivist-based MOOCs (cMOOC), which was based on
exploring new pedagogies beyond traditional classroom and emphasizing
that learning and knowledge emerge from interaction, creativity, autonomy
and informal social networking learning relatively free from institutional
constraints.
2. And the later content-based MOOCs (xMOOCs) such as those offered by
Coursera and edX, which emphasize a more traditional and behaviorist
learning approach through instructional methods with video presentations,
short quizzes and testing.

5. Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR)

6. Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR)
1) Bleking Institute of Technology (BTH)
2) Carinthia University of Applied Sciences
3) FH Campus Wien University of applied sciences
4) Polytechnic Institute of Porto (ISEP)
5) University of Deusto
6) Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED)
7) Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M)

7. Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR)

8. Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR)

9.  RLC circuit
 Half-wave rectifier with filter
 Half-wave rectifier without filter
 Inverter operational amplifier
 Non-inverter operational amplifier
 Regulator with zener diode
 Common emitter BJT
 Common collector BJT
Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR)

14. Organization
1st edition course: May 2013 – September 2013 (5 months)
2nd edition course: November 2013 – January 2014 (3 months)
 8 modules of 10 hours
 The first module introduces circuit simulation with tools such as SPICE and
Micro-Cap and the subsequent modules involves real-time practicing with VISIR
35 years old students or older 43%
Active workers 50%
Undergraduate students in a related field 18%
Graduate or postgraduate students in a related field 19%
Students with a non-university degree in a related field 23%
Students enrolled in this MOOC especially because of the use of a remote laboratory 81%

15. Organization
 Access to experiments is provided by
the MOOC’s portal through an
integrated scheduling/booking system
 The initial settings allow 16
simultaneous users per 60 minutes
slot and for each user a maximum of
two simultaneous slots booked and
a limitation of 14 slots per course
 With these settings, VISIR allows up
to 384 students to experiment with
any of the designed practices of the
MOOC

16. Implementation

17. Implementation

18. Implementation

19. https://unedcoma.es/
UNED COMA

20. For more information about remote laboratories, we invite you to
access to the web page of the Electrical & Computer Engineering
department of the UNED.
http://ohm.ieec.uned.es/
Research on Technologies for Engineering Education

21. Thanks for your Attention !
Manuel Castro
mcastro@ieec.uned.es
http://www.slideshare.com/mmmcastro/
Full Professor
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department (DIEEC)
Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED)
President
IEEE Education Society