e-Engineering: engineering school at home without compromise

Abstract

For many years, e-learning courses were restricted to nontechnical areas. The main reason was the impossibility for students to have access to laboratories to perform practical works, which are crucial for them to acquire the technical skills associated with any technical area. This reality changed with the widespread of high-speed broadband Internet services, even in the most remote, isolated areas, which made possible the remote control of equipment and laboratory instrumentation in real time. Students have now the possibility of remotely performing practical works and of developing technical skills without leaving their homes. This paper presents the EOLES course, an entirely online third-year English-taught course in Electronics and Optics for Embedded Systems that uses remote laboratories to grant students the technical skills an engineer is expected to have, and the efforts that have been made to generate the conditions for other higher education institutions to develop and offer their own e-Engineering courses.