Collaborative activities in the remote laboratory work Saad Maarouf, Mhiri Radhi, Nerguizian Vahé, Dodo Amadou Moustapha Electrical Engineering Department École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) Montreal, Canada maarouf.saad@etsmtl.ca Saliah-Hassane Hamadou 1 , Sahli Sandra 2 , Ouertani Saber 3 , Brady Gérald 4 1 Téluq, 2 Cégep de Valleyfield, 3 Cégep de Sorel Tracy, 4 Cégep de Granby 1 Montreal, 2 Valleyfield, 3 Sorel Tracy, 4 Granby, Canada Abstract—Through the evolution of the Internet and its accessibility everywhere and any time, Laboratories At Distance (LAD) are attracting more and more interest and becoming viable solutions for distance learning and sharing sophisticated equipment. Information and communication technology (ICT) is the basis for LAD and can also provide enrichment for the conventional laboratory. These new technological possibilities coincide with the emergence of new learning approaches and raise questions about the potential role of laboratory work in the training of engineering students. The techno-pedagogy is currently revolutionizing the way traditional training by bringing the experience of the laboratory in the classroom, at home and in various locations. This also allows the student to be more in touch with the technological reality of the laboratory and even industrial space through virtual tours. In addition, when using a Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach, new technologies allow considering an initial problem focus on industrial reality and on a hardware setup laboratory. With the emergence of active teaching approaches and the development of distance learning, collaborative work is required as an effective activity to support learning. The laboratory work is already based on teamwork. This paper presents two typical projects related to laboratory at distance. The first named LAD uses the control of distant existing equipment during the experimentation between different users. The second (TLAD) is based on a miniaturized electronic kit coupled to an appropriate software to perform different electronic experiments. The outcome of these two projects is presented with their advantages and drawbacks. Keywords-Lab At Distance; Problem Based Learning, Lab@ home, Collaborative work, ICT. I. INTRODUCTION For more than 10 years, most educational institutions around the world have coped with the challenge of adapting traditional educational approaches of teaching/learning to the current habits of modern society, for which the Internet is becoming the main channel used to convey the needed exchanged information regarding any subject. The evolution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) generated a revolution in several sectors. Positive experiences of e-Learning were experienced and allowed unprecedented development. In many organizations the e-Learning is part of the learning strategy, and it is fully adopted in various courses and laboratory programs [1-2] Today, there is an evolving consensus that universities need to strike a better balance between engineering science and engineering practice. There is a strong interest in improving engineering education for a variety of reasons: • Students yearn for direct, first-hand experiences and not a professor’s narration of the textbook or PowerPoint slides • Industry is one of the primary customers of the university. Those customers are constantly challenging academia to make curricula more relevant to professional practice • The qualifications of the professoriate are not always adapted for teaching. While it is often assumed that great researchers are also great teachers, most research shows that there is no correlation between effective teaching and effective research [3] • Several studies have demonstrated that active, collaborative, Problem-Based Learning (PBL) are more efficient than traditional lecture-based teaching methods [4]. The laboratory of a course is considered as a fundamental part of the education and training for engineers and scientists. The concept of On line laboratory or Lab At Distance (LAD) has timidly accompanied this trend. Today, with the development of digital equipment and the increased performances of Internet communication, LAD found an interesting tool in training systems. LAD is a concept that tends to spread into science and engineering courses at different levels. Development of remote laboratory is introduced in different ways with typical examples given in the next sections. Active learning has attracted strong advocates among faculty looking for alternatives to traditional teaching methods, while sceptical professors regard active learning as other educational fads. For many teachers active learning remains a vague question about what it is and how it differs from traditional engineering education, since this is already “active” through homework assignment and laboratories. It is not possible to provide universally accepted definitions for all of the vocabulary of active learning since different authors in the field have interpreted some terms differently. For example, there are many different approaches that go under the name of problem-based learning [5- 6].