Work in Progress: Applications of Internet of Things (IoT) in Distance Lab Checkoff

Many colleges and universities provide education f or students who are unable to attend classes in person, called distance learning. Distance learning facilitates adult students who often have family and work commitments. For the last two decades, engineering schools have been offering distance courses over the Intern e , which is a common method of facilitating distance courses. Since lab activities in engineering fields are a crucial part of learning, providing same laboratory experience that on-campus students receive for distancelearning students has remained a challenge. This ch allenge consists of both the lack of laboratory equipment and the limited availability o f the instructor for assistance and checkoff. Electrical lab equipment, such as a function genera tor, oscilloscope, and power supply, are expensive to purchase and maintain. Additionally, i t is not possible to build many lab stations close to distance learners. The limited availabilit y of instructors to verify students’ work has made it difficult for students to receive the help they need to complete projects. Multiple methods, such as lab simulators or a remote laborat ory, have been proposed and used to address these challenges based on the idea that sim ulators can replace the physical experiments. There are multiple software programs t hat enable students to design electronic circuits. These programs contain virtual instrument s such as oscilloscopes, function generators, and logic analyzers that can be used to simulate an d observe the voltages and currents at various points of a circuit. However, no simulator can completely replace the actual hands-on laboratory experience. Fortunately, inexpensive lab equipment such as Anal og Discovery is available for distance students to build and test their circuits. To addre ss the checkoff issue, distance students commonly are asked to provide a webcam and arrange time with their instructors to verify the experiment results. In this paper, we propose a method based on Internet of Things (IoT) to enable distance students to store their test result s in the cloud. Therefore, instructors can check them off based on their data, which can be availabl e nywhere at any time.