Collaborative learning in laboratory-oriented courses using web conferencing for shared control of physical laboratory experiments

The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota has embarked on an innovative method to conduct the laboratory component for its Electric Drives course. The method involves exploiting the versatility of the Adobe Breeze 5.1 package, which can create a computer interface for users to actively participate from remote computers in ongoing experiments. Apart from the instructor being able to demonstrate the experiment to students, she can also actively involve the students by giving them remote control of the experiment. So the experiment can be performed in a collaborative manner by giving control to each group of students or individual students with all students having viewing privileges. The students can get a real-time experience using this new method. The cost of laboratory setups can be greatly reduced using this method. The method allows a large number of students to perform experiments using just one physical laboratory setup. Hence the university can reduce its investments on laboratory apparatuses and invest on the software, which is much more cost effective.