Blended learning experience supported by a virtual laboratory for STEM subjects training
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INTRODUCTION. The recent pandemic caused by COVID-19 has led to numerous changes in public health protocols, as well as a deep socioeconomic impact. Policies such as social distancing and lockdowns have conditioned interpersonal relations and resulting in dramatic consequences for many companies and workers. Specifically, in the educational context, universities have been forced to adapt teaching methodologies due to the control policies applied by authorities. Therefore, the use of on-line teaching tools, combined with face-to-face teaching experiences (blended learning, BL), represents an interesting approach within this context. METHOD. BL allows the reduction of the student’s ratio per classroom, avoiding a total suppression of face-to-face teaching, taking advantage of both modalities. Hence, an interesting proposal is the implementation of a virtual simulation environment for engineering students, with the aim of emulating a real liquid level control system, located at the laboratories of the Escuela Politécnica of Engineering of Ferrol, of the University of A Coruña. The marks obtained in the tutored work in two academic years were compared to evaluate the effect of the BL methodology on students’ academic performance. RESULTS. To carry out this work, we propose a BL experience supported by a virtual laboratory built from the integration of two novel software tools: Factory I/O as a virtualization and emulation system of real industrial scenes and plants and Node-RED as a programming environment for the design of control and communication systems. Based on the academic results, it can be concluded that this methodology has a positive effect on students’ performance. DISCUSSION. This realistic real-time 3D simulation and visualization environment provides flexibility to students by simplifying the organization of their tasks and allowing them to work autonomously by applying the basic concepts of control engineering. In addition, this BL experience helps students to develop hard and soft skills.
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