Remote Energy Lab - Experience and Improvements of European Cooperation in Remote Labs (SHORT)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online teaching methods have gained more interest. Most formats of teaching can be easily transferred into an online format from a technical point of view. However, this is more difficult for practical courses in a laboratory. Together with partners from three European universities, we tackled the issue of providing a practical online course for higher education levels in the framework of the EuroTeQ university. In this work, we present our concept of the course and discuss the course goals and further improvements. We tested the remote lab setting in order to offer the course on a yearly basis in future. The remote lab was focused on energy engineering and was open to students from different engineering disciplines and countries. The course was comprised of three blocks, each consisting of one lecture on the broader context of the topic and one experimental laboratory session. The experimental session was streamed via a video broadcasting service. Students were required to either deliver a written report or to write a newspaper article for each of the three blocks. The learning outcome of the course was that students on the one hand learn about the technologies discussed in the course and on the other hand learn about intercultural communication skills. The goal was to show the diversity of technologies and to show the significance of each technology for a specific country. The online experimental sessions proved to deliver a clear explanation of the topic for the students when provided with sufficient course material adapted to online formats. Contrary, keeping a high level of interaction with students during remote experiments was found most challenging.