The evaluation of remote laboratories: Development and application of a holistic model for the evaluation of online remote laboratories in manufacturing technology education

The integration of online remote laboratories is still an emerging field in engineering education, especially in the area of manufacturing technology. Over the last years and in different project contexts the Institute of Forming Technology and Lightweight Construction (IUL) and the Center for Higher Education (zhb) at TU Dortmund University developed a laboratory environment, which gives the opportunity to the students to do experiments like the tensile tests-a core experiment for defining material properties-from the computer at home using online technology. This system already has been used in different teaching contexts and its usage is now expanded step by step to other courses. Hence, its practice-based evaluation is coming more and more into focus in order to improve the technical equipment as well as its imbedding into the educational settings. This means that not only the technology and its functionality are evaluated but also a special focus has to be put on the student-computer interaction. Therefore a holistic model for evaluating the system and its usage has been developed. This model divides into three different perspectives for evaluation: (1) The individual perspective focusing the user's learning process in the laboratory environment, (2) the system-perspective focusing the technical equipment, and finally (3) the course perspective focusing the lab's integration into the course context. This evaluation model was inspired by several other evaluation approaches existing in literature. The aim was to work out both, a model that serves as a fitting evaluation process for the explicit context existing at TU Dortmund University and at the same time as an adequate approach for other remote laboratory contexts. This paper presents the evaluation model with its perspectives as well as the used questionnaires and its first application in context of an international online course making use of the IUL's remote lab.