Remote Versus In-hand Hardware Laboratory in Digital Circuits Courses

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has isolated many engineering students at home and complicated access to instrumentation and hardware resources necessary to support laboratory courses. One viable alternative to bringing the hardware to students (and the correspondingly high overhead associated with shipping laboratory kits all over the world) is to enable remote access to that hardware. A remote lab allows students to access real hardware physically located in a single location from anywhere in the world. Advances in cloud computing allow students to take advantage of a full-fledged remote experience without compromising what they could have accomplished if they were physically present in the lab. While remote access laboratories are not new, the COVID-19 pandemic has enabled a unique opportunity to compare learning with how remote access to real hardware vs. hands-on access to the same hardware. Comparisons between the two modes of learning were made for a junior level course in digital circuit design using field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware offered via remote access in autumn 2020 and via hands-on access in the same course in winter 2020. Detailed assessments of student work were grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy to classify the complexity of student cognition and learning. This study presents assessment results associated with a single laboratory assignment that was the first in a series of laboratory assignments in the digital design course. Work from 41 students from each offering were analyzed within the first five levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. Results show that students performed significantly better in terms of overall scores and analyze skills when presented with remote access to laboratory hardware than when having that hardware in hand. Comparisons between the two settings in the remaining four levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (remember, understand, apply, evaluate) were not significantly different between the two offerings. These results complement other studies that highlight the benefits of remote laboratories. Accordingly, the increased efficiency and cost savings of the remote lab approach can offer stable and reliable instruction well beyond the COVID-19 crisis.