Increasing Student Access to Industrial and Scientific Equipment Training through Authentic Remote Learning Experiences

An important part of preparing students for the technical workforce is training on engineering technologies that are currently used in industry.

However, due to high equipment costs and other limitations, providing students with access to industrial equipment can be challenging for many community colleges.

Even when such equipment is available, it is in lab facilities that have limited availability and little flexibility to accommodate students’ work and family schedules. These limitations were spotlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced lab facilities to close altogether.

As a result, students had even less access to the lab equipment and training, preventing course completion for many students.

Although remote instruction and distance education are not new concepts, providing an authentic remote experience for equipment training remains an open problem. Computer simulations have been used to lower the costs for training using industrial equipment.

However, these tools tend to oversimplify the equipment, with resulting limits in students’ ability to gain skills in operating the equipment and troubleshooting problems.

This project will develop and assess new remote access tools that allow students to control physical industrial equipment over the internet. This approach will provide a new capability for sharing resources amongst colleges.

In addition, these tools will give students experience with working on distributed teams, helping prepare them for the technical workforce.

By expanding access to technical courses for students living in rural locations or in other situations that limit access to lab facilities, the project will help broaden participation in the technical workforce.<br/><br/>Lab facilities at the Community College of Allegheny County currently provide students with in-person training on industrial equipment including robots, programmable logic controllers, and mechatronic devices.

The goal of this project is to create a new remote capability for controlling equipment in the lab facilities and evaluate the impact of this capability on student learning.

Remote capability will enable students to access physical equipment and view the results of their control actions and control programs in an immersive environment on a computer at another location. Stereo cameras will transmit a three-dimensional view of a work cell in the lab facility.

Students will be able to remotely trigger actuators over the internet to achieve a desired behavior and view the results of their actions in near-real-time.

This project will: (1) implement and test new hardware and software interfaces for lab equipment; (2) develop lab exercises using the remote capability, lesson plans for instructors, and instructional materials for students; (3) evaluate student learning in on-line courses and compare it to concurrent in-person courses; and (4) expand the implementation to multiple institutions and multiple course offerings.

Using a mixed methods approach, the project evaluation will use focus groups, student surveys, and pre- and post-tests to assess the impact of the new remote capability on students’ comprehension of the technologies and their confidence in their ability to use the equipment.

This project is funded by the Advanced Technological Education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the nation's economy.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.