Experiences from a distance course in electric drives including on-line labs and tutorials

This paper explains the steps taken to convert the electric drives course activities at Chalmers University of Technology to a distance course directed towards the automotive industry, including interactive remote web-labs, and on-line tutorials and computer lab sessions. A first pilot course is conducted during autumn 2011. From the course evaluation, from student results and from experience of the involved teachers during the work, it could be concluded that the first pilot course worked as planned, yielding good results in students' performance compared to the on-campus course, except for the practical lab part where students from both courses performed equally well. The web course got an average of 4.2 (out of 5.0) from the course evaluations. In order to improve the web-course, the interactivity during the practical labs should be improved.