Ubiquitous and Smart Learning Paradigm for Preparing Qualified and Skilled Engineers

In this paper an innovative approach for preparing qualified and skilled engineers is presented. The paper reports on a new inter-institutional master’s degree program in Information and Communication System (ICS) that is delivered online and across five European institutions. The program has been developed under the European grant “Remotelabs Access in Internet-based Performance-Centered Learning Environment for Curriculum Support (RIPLECS)”, and it aims to mitigate the deficit in qualified professionals and technical job-specific skills. On the other hand, the program copes with the predominant students’ lifestyles by eradicating distance and time restrictions. The program is administrated and delivered through an online learning platform (DIPSEIL) that enables world-wide distribution of learning resources by utilizing multiple Web servers at partners’ institutions within a single network topology. Access to remote laboratories as an integral task within the subjects, in order to guarantee the acquisition of practical competences as well as the theoretical ones, is the main novelty of the program, making it a unique approach of its kind. The development and the organization of the program are discussed in this paper. This is followed by a description of a selected state-of-the-art remote laboratory–Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR)–that is going to be adopted in one of the master ́s subjects– Power Supplies for Information and Communication Technology (ICT). VISIR is a remote laboratory for wiring and measuring electronic circuits on a breadboard. Some previous results from the system implementation are presented along with the scheduled practices to be done within the new master’s degree program.