Elsevier

Annual Reviews in Control

Volume 33, Issue 2, December 2009, Pages 246-252
Annual Reviews in Control

Collaborative learning and engineering workspaces,☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arcontrol.2009.05.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Research studies aimed to improve remote collaboration and education are presented and related to practical results for control and automation engineering education. Individual, social and cultural aspects are considered as important requirements in the development of collaborative learning environments. A collaborative learning environment for control and automation education, which includes mixed-reality lab experiments, is presented. The proposed environment hosts remote lab experiments that enable the development of collaborative projects among students working at different sites. Experiences using the proposed learning environment in both university and vocational courses are presented.

Introduction

How to effectively use computer technologies to support people in their work, in particular when doing collaborative activities with coordination constraints, is a topic that has been extensively researched for several years (for instance, the term Computer Supported Cooperative Work – CSCW was coined in the 80s). Researchers recognize that this is not only a technological challenge but an organizational and social topic (Boedker, 1991, Grudin, 1988, Kaptelinin, 1996). Moreover, it is not restricted to collocated actors and vision representation (Fjeld et al., 2002). However, only recently a major shift of focus on the difference between cooperation and collaboration occurred. The former being some kind of protocol to avoid conflicts and provide harmonic synchronization of task oriented work (assembly line model), whereas the later being a struggle for new products, tools, work processes and a higher quality of all (creative workgroup model) (Carroll, Neale, Isenhour, Rosson, & McCrickard, 2003). CSCW environments can be classified into the following type (Laso-Ballesteros & Karlsson, 2006): knowledge enabled workers, virtualized collaborative environments, shared workspaces, virtual communities, and responsive environments.

Most of the attempts to develop environments to improve the quality of group-work and group-learning, however, does not handle aspects of real production processes, as well as physical and concrete material issues. The business and desktop metaphor is still dominating the information and learning perspective. Collaboration in and between producing enterprises means learning, working and inventing together from different locations, companies, functions and at different times (Camarinha-Matos & Lima, 2001). Among the benefits of distributed collaboration are: reduced problems of resolution cycle time, increasing productivity and agility, reducing travel to sites, enabling more timely and effective interactions, faster design iterations, improving resource management and facilitate innovation.

Collaborative work over remote sites in so-called virtual teams is therefore a challenge to developers of information- and communication technology, as well as to the involved workforce. Collaboration demands a deep involvement and commitment in a common design, production process or service, i.e., to work jointly with others on a project, on parts or systems of parts Acosta and Moreno, 2005, Erbe, 2005. Information mediated only via vision and sound might be insufficient for a fruitful collaboration in some production domains. There are several studies indicating that vividness and task performance can be positively influenced by tangible user interfaces or touch feedback with shared tangible objects (Griffin, Provancher, & Cutkosky, 2005). Having the parts in hands in designing and in manufacturing is often desirable and in maintenance is it necessary. To grasp a part at a remote site requires force (haptic)-feedback in addition to vision and sound.

Engineering education has become a crucial aspect for most countries, since it has been recognized that skilled engineers are one of the main components for the development of innovative products and services, as well as for the optimization of production processes, to ensure high productivity and quality. Considering education on control and automation systems, a key issue is the reduction of the gap between classical theoretical courses and real industrial practice. Hence, it is important to allow students to operate with devices, systems, and techniques that are as close as possible to those of industrial settings. Unfortunately, to reproduce a real industrial plant in an academic environment is not a trivial task. Industrial equipments are, in general, very expensive (in terms of acquisition, installation, operation, and maintenance costs). Furthermore, safety constraints should also be taken into account. Such factors restrict the use of real industrial devices in academic laboratories, which in general are then structured as small-scale experiments with little connection to industrial reality. Within this context, industrial lab facility that are available via Web and therefore accessible at flexible times, to a larger number of individuals, helps to improve the overall cost-effectiveness of such solution. Moreover they offer perspectives of shaping teaching scenarios, which are close to practical engineering team-work. Ma and Nickerson (2006) argue that well constructed group activities used in conjunction with remote labs generate an added value in regard to team skills and remote engineering competences. The development of learning environments for students to train collaborative work over distances where face-to-face work is excluded is of utmost importance.

The Internet growth has brought new paradigms and possibilities in technological education. In particular, it allows the remote use of experimental facilities employed to illustrate concepts handled in classroom and serves as an enabling and powerful technology for distance teaching. However, the availability of remote experiments is not a sufficient condition to ensure success in learning. Stand-alone remote experiments without connection to adequate learning material usually lead students to the use of a trial and error strategy, which has a lower learning impact than originally expected (Schaf & Pereira, 2007). Moreover, remote facilities are available 24-7 increasing the demand in the number of faculty members and tutors required to provide online guidance.

In order to alleviate these problems, remote experiments can be integrated into virtual learning environments (VLEs) (Michaelides, Elefthreiou, & Müller, 2004) that manage and provide guidance via learning materials before, during and after the experimentation. This paper proposes such an integrated learning environment, on which mixed-reality lab experiments and student guidance tools are combined for control and automation education. Mixed-reality experiments (Bruns & Erbe, 2004), on which simulated components can be combined to real equipment, are used to illustrate different learning situations according to the knowledge level of remote students.

The research described in this paper has been developed within the scope of the RExNet Consortium (Hine et al., 2007), an ALFA2 II financed project. The consortium had mainly three goals: to share, harmonize and spread current skills on remote experimentation (Hine et al., 2007). The work relies on previous projects on mixed-reality learning environments and remote laboratories for vocational education in mechatronics (Müller & Ferreira, 2005). Recent developments took place in German–Brazilian cooperation.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the motivation driving this research study; Section 3 describes possibilities for establishing a connection between real and virtual (simulated) environments; in Section 4, the proposed learning environment is described; Section 5 outlines developed case studies developed for validating the proposed environment. Finally, Section 6 draws conclusions and Section 7 indicates future work directions.

Section snippets

Collaborative environments

To achieve higher levels of human–human interactions, which are required to solve complex engineering problems, a strong support of collaboration and multi-perspectivity is required. Concepts of collaboration are closely related to learning. During collaboration, humans interact employing self-critiquing (reflection), inquiring and arguing skills; these skills propel the knowledge building. This is the very essence of the (social) constructivism pedagogy employed nowadays in virtual

Real–virtual connection

The connection between real and simulated counterparts brings flexibility to systems that involve complex and configurable components. Mixed-reality techniques support this connection, providing the integration of real and virtual spaces for collaboration. This may broaden the range of CSCEs. It allows a dynamic interchange of simulated and real parts in remote experiments, via the concept of interchangeable components (Schaf & Pereira, 2007).

Overall architecture

The proposed learning environment, which has been named GCAR-EAD5(Schaf & Pereira, 2007), integrates mixed-reality experiments within the Learning Management System (LMS) MOODLE.6 Educational material was developed in Portuguese and English languages, aiming to combine theoretical concepts with

Case studies

This section describes some real applications using a virtual learning environment integrated with mixed-reality lab experiments, which is described into details in Schaf and Pereira (2007).

Conclusions

Mixed-reality concepts support learning environments with remote labs and distributed workspaces. The bidirectional tele-cooperation functionality allows students to use the Internet for collaborative engineering. The presented environment allow groups of students/technicians (or even employees) at remote locations to take part at the same training using the same equipment (either simulated or real). The users are able to work in a collaborative way to solve problems and explore solutions to

Future work

While software may be designed to achieve closer social ties or specific deliverables, it is hard to support collaboration without also enabling relationships to form, and to support a social interaction without some kind of shared co-authored works. Analogously, the differentiation between social and collaborative software can be compared as that between play and work. Play ethic (methods) applied to work turn activities that employ computers a more comfortable experience. This is commonly

Acknowledgements

This work was partially financially supported by the Brazilian research agencies CAPES, FINEP, and CNPq. Thanks are also given to SENAI National Department (SENAI-DN) financial support in the mechatronics experiment project.

Thanks are also given to the RExNet consortium partners for their fruitful collaboration and comments.

The authors also like to specially thank our research partners – Martin Faust and Yong-Ho Yoo, from ArtecLab; Fabricio Campana, Clóvis Reichert and Igor Krakheche from

F.M. Schaf is a research assistant at the Electrical Engineering Department at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2006 from UFRGS. Currently is a Ph.D. candidate at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Developed several applications in Web-accessible experiments within the scope of the European Alfa project. Main research interests in remote handling, virtual learning environments and collaborative learning environments

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    F.M. Schaf is a research assistant at the Electrical Engineering Department at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2006 from UFRGS. Currently is a Ph.D. candidate at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Developed several applications in Web-accessible experiments within the scope of the European Alfa project. Main research interests in remote handling, virtual learning environments and collaborative learning environments for engineering education. Studies points to the very essence of this article and is the major responsible for the future works development and research.

    D. Müller received a degree in production engineering (Dipl.-Ing.), a M.Sc. in educational science and a Ph.D. in computer science with a thesis on modeling and simulation. Since 1991 he has been a member of the Art-Work-Technology Lab (artecLab) at the University of Bremen, Germany. Before his return to university, Dr. Müller worked as an engineer in the industrial manufacturing sector and as a teacher in vocational training. Currently, he is a senior scientist at the Art-Work-Technology Lab. His special research interests are focused on innovative forms of human-computer-interaction, especially mixed-reality and tangible media for new learning environments and industrial design concepts. He has been a visiting researcher at the Korean University of Technology and Education (KUT). He has acted as member of International Program Committees for several conferences in engineering education. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Online Engineering.

    F.W. Bruns is a university professor for applied computer science in production automation at the University of Bremen. He received his Diploma-degree in Spacecraft Engineering at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, in 1971. On a 1 year postgraduate fellowship from the DAAD he started his Ph.D. work at Stanford University USA about fluid dynamic problems. From 1972 to 1977 he was scientist and lecturer at the TU Berlin and there he received his degree of a Dr.-Ing. in 1979. From 1979 to 1982 he worked at the German National Environmental Agency (Umweltbundesamt) on method-bases for the simulation of environmental phenomena. From 1982 to 1987 he founded and headed a software company for automation control. Since 1987 he is professor at the University of Bremen. His fields of interest are human–machine interfaces, modeling and simulation of production systems, mixed-reality and learning environments. He coordinated several European Research projects about mixed-reality interfaces, and was a member of the European advisory group for transatlantic cooperation in e-learning.

    C.E. Pereira received the Dr.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 1995, the M.Sc. degree in computer science in 1990 and the B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1987, both from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil. Associate professor of the Electrical Engineering Department at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. His research focuses on methodologies and tool support for the development of distributed real-time embedded systems, with special emphasis on industrial automation applications and the use of distributed objects over industrial communication protocols. He is Chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Manufacturing Plant Control (TC 5.1). He is also an Associate Editor of the Journals Control Engineering Practice. He has acted as member of International Program Committees for several conferences in the field of industrial automation, manufacturing, industrial protocols, and real-time distributed object computing. He is currently Chair of the Brazilian Automation Society, the IFAC’s national member organization in Brazil.

    H.-H. Erbe received his Dr.-Ing. degree in 1974 from the TU Berlin in Engineering Mechanics. From 1975 to 1980 he was Head of Research Group on Fracture Mechanics, Federal Institute on Material Research, Berlin. From 1980 to 1986 he was professor of Mechanical Engineering together with Professional Education in this field, University of Bremen. From 1986 to 2002 he was professor at Technical University Berlin (Center for Human-Machine Systems). In 2002 he retired and died in December 2007. He was Chair of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), Technical Committee on Cost Oriented Automation (1999–2005), http://www.zmms.tu-berlin.de/LCA. He coordinated several EU projects related to the improvement and human-centeredness of production in small and medium enterprises and chaired several international IFAC conferences on balanced and cost oriented automation. He was a highly appreciated guest researcher at artecLab, University of Bremen.

    Research was partly financially supported by the Brazilian Research Agencies CAPES and CNPq.

    ☆☆

    An earlier version of this article was presented at the IFAC Conference on Cost Effective Automation (CEA) in Networked Product Development and Manufacturing, Monterrey, Mexico, October 2–5, 2007.

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    In memoriam.

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