On the Experience of Using NI ELVIS III in Remote Laboratory Practice During Pandemic Lockdown

Abstract

By the beginning of COVID pandemic, remote education technology have was being implemented at some level by almost every educational institution, but the following lockdown forced the world to accelerate this process. In these circumstances, a lack of laboratory practice in online engineering education was revealed. The existing lab equipment, even quite modern, was focused on offline laboratory experience, and required enough efforts to be reachable from the outside. The International Scientific and Educational Center “National Instruments – Polytechnic” possessed a number of virtual instrumentation lab stations called NI ELVIS II, which had been being used in education for more than 10 years and allowed the replacement outdated bulky instruments with computer-based all-in-one virtual measurement solutions. But even these devices required additional development to allow students to work remotely, did not allow them to work in groups and manage access control. The new product applied by our professors called NI ELVIS III appeared to be a perfect solution to establish online lab practice. We managed to run several labs in electronics course with almost zero configuration, group collaboration and possible real-time teacher supervision. The paper describes the experience of applying NI ELVIS III in remote electronics lab, the benefits and caveats of using this platform.