Design and Development of Remote Laboratory System to Facilitate Online Learning in Hardware Programming Subjects

The world is moving towards online learning as part of an effort to safeguard the health of the communities due the inevitable COVID-19 pandemic. Transitioning from traditional learning to online learning presents challenges that have to be addressed by academics in order to maintain the learning experience and to ensure the learning objectives are equally achieved. In engineering education, practical experience is one of the core activities that are greatly affected by the implementation of online learning. Students are unable to access physical laboratory due to closure of university and the requirements of social distancing. This paper presents the development, implementation and observation of deploying remote laboratory system in replacing the traditional physical laboratory sessions for the teaching and learning process in hardware programming related subjects.