Development of a learning pilot for the remote teaching of Smart Maintenance using open source tools

Technology has created a vast array of educational tools readily available to educators, but it also has created a shift in the skills and competences demanded from new graduates. As data science and machine learning are becoming commonplace across all industries, computer programming is emerging as one of the fundamental skills engineers will require to navigate the future and current workplace. It is, thus, the responsibility of educational institutions to rise to this challenge and to provide students with an appropriate training that facilitates the development of these skills. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of open source tools to introduce students to the more practical side of Smart Maintenance. By developing a learning pilot based mainly on computational notebooks, students without a programming background are walked through the relevant techniques and algorithms in an experiential format. The pilot highlights the superiority of Colab notebooks for the remote teaching of subjects that deal with data science and programming. The resulting insights from the experience will be used for the development of subsequent iterations during the current year.