Development of a digital communications course enriched by virtual and remote laboratory tools

Digital communications is a basic concept for rapidly growing fields of Electrical, Computer and Electronics Engineering like wireless and mobile communication systems, radar and electronic warfare, telemetry and many signal processing techniques. A re-designed digital communications course with ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) based diverse tools including matlab assignments, remote experiments and interactive simulators is described in this study. First, the objectives of the course, learning outcomes and evaluation methods are described. The re-designed course is offered in the last semester at Atilim University, and performance increase in students is compared with the previous year's offering, and by evaluating the course on a topic-based approach.