Online labs and virtual simulators for engineering education

The project idea is to offer online lab platform combined with curriculum module and open learning content for educational institutions. The online lab platform is integrating existing and new remote and virtual labs into one portal by creating unified interface and sharing functionality.There is strong need in the educational sector to offer real and virtual lab access to students. Europe needs to push engineering education into new level to compete with China and other Asian countries. Offering practical engineering lab is crucial for rising smart and innovative engineers, but todays education needs much more applying the internet technology to the education process and connecting the practical experimentation with real industry needs. Outdated lab equipment is quite common problem in all levels of education. In this project we are addressing to offer cross-platform solution for different types of online labs which can be located either in educational institution or SME-s across the Europe. Main engineering application and processes needed by many curricula will be virtualized. All online labs will be connected with curriculum modules where special attention is payed for IGIP engineering module and CDIO framework.The project consortium consists of 2 universities, 2 SME-s and 1 VET school from Estonia, Finland, Germany and Sweden. All partners have strong history of working with online labs and engineering educational concepts. The project implementation is carried out by following activities:- Research and analyze of existing platforms, online labs and European activities- Develop unified solution to access different remote and online labs- Create a network of organization offering online experimentation- Develop research sharing platform to cross-access different online labs- Develop simulations models for most common engineering applications in higher education- Develop curriculum moduleProject results are as following:O1 Unified remote lab web interfaceO2 Virtualized simulation models, designed based on study as a service conceptO3 Curriculum module compatible with IGIP engineering module and CDIO frameworkProject impact is unified IGIP and CDIO compatible online engineering module for mechatronic and embedded systems. The module can be easily incorporated into existing curricula of any interested VET institution or higher education institution. Virtualized embedded system and robotic models and online labs can be accessed also by any school, thus the impact for trainees and learners is raising significantly the accessibility to practical experimentation over the web and impact for institutions is to easy way to include the online module into their existing curricula.