IT-Enhanced Laboratory Experience within a Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum

The emergence of information technology (IT) is enabling engineering educators to constantly reconsider both the content and the means of delivery of modern undergraduate curricula. Online learning environments are rapidly becoming viable options for providing students with a bridge from theoretical concepts to practical engineering applications. They can be made to represent repositories of integrated tools that provide a delivery mechanism for rich learning content, advanced assessment capabilities as well as affordable access to a wide range of other resources. Online educational environments are being used at Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT) to provide undergraduate engineering students with a comprehensive laboratory experience based on content-rich and flexible remote and virtual experiments. The concept of online laboratories (i.e. remote experiments based on actual physical devices and/or virtual experiments representing pure software simulations) is being expanded through the use of information technology to create standardized laboratory, experiment, device and enhanced simulation descriptions. This enables students to run experiments that may involve multiple devices in different laboratories at various locations, perform collaborative experiments with multiple participants, and combine experiments and simulations into one integrated experience. This paper presents the results of an effort to design, implement and evaluate an integrated laboratory system for delivering both remote and virtual experiments. The methods and software modules implemented and the pedagogical approach developed for integrating them into a comprehensive student laboratory experience have been used in a sophomore-level core undergraduate course on solid mechanics taken by all undergraduate engineering majors at SIT as well as in a junior-level course on mechanisms and machine dynamics for mechanical engineering majors. Some results of the learning outcomes assessment conducted over a period of time are presented.