This was an invited talk at the "Engineering for Sustainable Future and Transformative Innovation" event organised by IEEE Kenya for 15/16 July. The talk was given remotely and included a live demonstration of our labs. The license for the slides is CC-BY-NC-4.0.

1. Prof Timothy D. Drysdale
Chair of Technology Enhanced Science Education
School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, UK
Remote
Laboratories
For All
“Engineering for
Sustainable Future and
Transformative Innovation”
15 July 2021, IEEE Kenya
For a copy of the slides:
timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk

2. “…. be a truly global university benefiting society as a whole.” University of Edinburgh
“Engineering for Sustainable Future and Transformative Innovation”, IEEE Kenya

3. https://practable.io

4. The future is
already here
— it's just not
very evenly
distributed.
Photo credit: Frederic Poirot

5. Commercial education technology
Some typical characteristics
- Embeds cultural values that don’t fit yours
- Does not do everything you need or want
- Cannot extend or modify (closed source)
- Surveils your students, and sells their data
- May want to replace you

6. Sustainable, innovative, valuable
education for all
- free (as in freedom, and privacy)
- equality (affordable by everyone)
- transparent (no closed-source)
- diverse (different views on the same topic)
- inclusive (different topics)
Can we genuinely say we respect & live our own
academic values whilst confining ourselves to
using current commercial edtech?

7. For the things we have to learn
before we can do them,
we learn by doing them.
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

8. Commercial education technology
Some typical characteristics
- Embeds cultural values that don’t fit yours
- Does not do everything you need or want
- Cannot extend or modify (closed source)
- Surveils your students, and sells their data
- May want to replace you
- May avoid tackling difficult, fragmented markets like
practical work for science, technology, engineering,
mathematics in a meaningful way

9. Do we really need practical work?
(spoiler alert: yes)

10. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Is the world still developing hardware? Yes!

11. Electricity Demonstration, 18th Century is a photograph by Science Photo Library

12. University of Giessen, founded 1607
Liebig introduced labs ca. 190 years ago
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded 1824
Eaton introduced labs shortly after
https://www.ucalgary.ca/uci/abroad/exchange/giessen
www.lib.rpi.edu/dept/library/html/Archives/buildings/winslow.html
Student feedback does lead to change!
Now nearly 200 years of labs

13. Projected world population by level of education
This visualization shows the Medium projection by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
The researchers who created this projection describe it as their "middle of the road scenario that can also be seen
as the most likely path".
1970 1980 2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
%
0
%
20
%
40
%
60
%
80
%
100
Post Secondary
Upper
Secondary
Lower
Secondary
Primary
Incomplete
Primary
No Education
Under 15
Source: Global Projection, Medium SSP2 - IIASA (2016) OurWorldInData.org/world-population-growth/ • CC BY
5%
20%
50%
x4 x2.5

23. Laboratories now … large scale, dedicated spaces
~£90M Capital
19 Labs, 50 Staff
Serves 5000 students
The Diamond, University of
Sheffield, 2015
The CTL, University of
Birmingham, 2018
~£40M Capital
3500 UG STEM students

24. ?
How much new
practical work
can a big
building
actually give you?
(hint: it’s expensive to
build, equip and staff)

25. Space can be unavailable due to location, funding, timing or any combination of these factors.
Edinburgh is a small city, tightly packed!

26. “How do we deal with this expansion [of student numbers]?
How do we still engage students early on with the world of
engineering? How do we show them the messiness of
engineering, the political and social aspects? ... How do we do
this beyond the capstone project? This type of education, the
type of education we want to have, is expensive. So how do
you do this for all students, large cohorts of students, without
compromising on everything?”
R. Graham, (2018) “The global state of the art in engineering
education,” New Engineering Education Transformation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

27. "I really enjoyed this visionary piece and look
forward to recommending it once published.“
- Reviewer
Timothy D. Drysdale, Simon Kelley, Anne-Marie Scott,
Victoria Dishon, Andrew Weightman,
Richard Lewis, Stephen Watts
Higher Education Pedagogies, 5:1, 210-222, 2020
Received 29 Jul 2019, Accepted 12 May 2020, Published online: 14 Sep 2020
Opinion Piece:
Non-Traditional Practical Work
for Traditional Campuses
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23752696.2020.1816845

28. Digital alternative for ALL STEM subjects:
Non-traditional practical work
Pedagogy
Practicality
Sustainability
-Remote labs
-Blended labs
-Virtual labs
-Simulations

29. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSQtI9PPjok
openEngineering Lab, The Open University UK

30. International & UK Awards:
openEngineering/openSTEM labs
• National Instruments
Global Engineering Impact Award
2019 (Education)
• The Guardian
Teaching Excellence Award 2018
• Global Online Labs Consortium
Remote Experiment Award 2018
• Times Higher Education
Leadership & Management Award
2017
(Outstanding Digital Innovation)

32. Space can be unavailable due to location, funding, timing or any combination of these factors.
Edinburgh is a small city, tightly packed!

34. Including development costs,
and running costs, remote labs
are highly cost effective.

35. World-leading teaching
- Pedagogical advances
- Practical & Sustainable
- Browser interface
- Hardware stays here
- Any experiment possible*
- Set and forget management
[ ]

36. Allocator
Pooling between institutions for
diversity, throughput, and resilience
Share kit across locations to break down teaching silos
e.g. art and engineering

38. Course
All My Courses >
Today 19:30
Today 20:30
All experiments >
Create booking
Search
>
>
>
Today , 19:30 - 20:30
Distance sensors
Machines 3
Available until: 22 Dec 2018
Remaining: 117 minutes
5/8
Square wave signals
Machines 3
Available until: 20 May 2019
Remaining: 180 minutes
Distance sensors
Power Electronics 3
Available until: 20 May 2019
Remaining: 180 minutes
3/5
1/8
Light sensors
Power Electronics 3
Available until: 20 May 2019
Remaining: 12 minutes
3/12
Digital circuits
Computing 3
Available until: Tomorrow
Remaining: 35 minutes
0/40
Available Until >
>

39. Can non-traditional practical work
replace in-person practical work?
• Not totally, and nor should it
• But it can expand the amount you can offer
• It can do new things you cannot do with in-person
labs, due to the rich data stream flowing between
people and objects

40. What about awareness in a world with
More and more remote engineering ->
Students must learn to infer what is going
On at a distance too!

41. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Sensory awareness for remote equipment –> infer from data available

42. DO TRAD
AND NTPW

43. Automated evaluation
Authentic assessment
• AI for observability 24/7
• EJ framework tolerates AI limitations
• Break toxic cycle of feedback dependency

45. Demonstration
Mr David Reid
PhD Student, University of Edinburgh
Remote laboratory user interface designer
Pedagogy researcher

46. Any teacher who
can be replaced
by a machine,
. . . should be.
Photo credit: celestis.com

47. Pedagogical approaches
Quality/Benefit
Human
Technology

48. Pedagogical approaches
Quality/Benefit
Human
Technology

49. Use cases
Teaching
• Students collect and analyse data for
assessed report
• Students explore difficult concepts in
their own time
• Students see that surprising or
counterintuitive results are real
• Lecturer demonstrates principle to live
audience with live experiment
• Answer a question from student with
demonstration
• Students develop experiment as project
• Adapt someone else’s experiment to
suit your purposes
• etc etc!
Other
• Enhance research impact and
dissemination by making prototypes
available remotely
• Outreach to schools and
communities
• Recruitment, including widening
participation (let each student
explore something they like)
• Public engagement (large interactive
sessions)
• Community contributions – e.g.
hybrid museums exhibits
• Make the campus a playful science
museum
• Inform visitors of our teaching and
research by direct interaction

50. Workshop technicians +
Learning Technology Developers
+ Student co-creators

51. Opportunities in LT & related spaces
Course Design
• Unpack ILO
• Identify pain points
• Identify “longed
for” features
• Create new digital
experiences to
address these
Development
• Remix interfaces
written in Javascript
and HTML5
• Develop
experiments (e.g.
Arduino +
electronics)
• Install and
configure software
on Raspberry Pi
Deployment
• Identify and arrange
access to
experiments
• Set up class lists
• (ultimately similar
tasks to working with
VLE on other course
aspects)
• Administer and
maintain
experimental fleet

52. Summary (1/3):
Why do remote laboratories?
New pedagogical opportunities:
-Student-led / reflective learning
-Authentic Assessment
-Student co-creation
-Community good

53. Summary (2/3):
Issues we face without them
- Cost & limitations of the current provision
- Increasing class sizes
- Limited laboratory space
- Loss of “exploratory” lab time
- Lack of campus space to build new buildings
- which would be costly
- take years to arrive,
- then be inflexible

54. Consider working with
the practable ecosystem
- open-source ecosystem
reflects your academic values
- increase your agency as
educator
- convenience of using existing
software infrastructure
timothy.drysdale@ed.ac.uk
https://practable.io

55. Except where otherwise noted
(e.g. photo credits, paper
images) these slides are
licensed according to
https://creativecommons.org/l
icenses/by-nc/4.0/