Integration of virtual and remote experiments into undergraduate engineering courses
Experiments play an important role in the education of undergraduate engineering students as they provide hands-on experience on the foundations of the discipline. Unfortunately, the recent change of the university program in Germany from the Diploma to the Bachelor/Master model had a direct negative impact on the curricula and the course schedules. The result of which is that the first-year curriculum is overloaded; exercises or practical courses have been dropped altogether from the first term, have been rescheduled to later terms and have been reduced in length. For this reason, other forms of experimenting have to be developed and integrated into the existing courses or lectures; virtual laboratories and remote experiments offer such an option: they enable students to access equipment 24h/7 days a week, they are independent from opening hours and the work schedule of the staff. Furthermore, simulations do have some other advantages: they provide a better control on the simulated phenomenon, allow observing effects and running experiments that are only very hard to measure or perform in practical applications. Another advantage besides their cost-efficiency is that simulations allow observations of effects in a simplified environment without any measurement errors.