New experiences and strategies in remote laboratories and apps for electronics: Proposal for a special session

Universities and educational organizations or institutions, when designing any electronics course, trust in experimentation through laboratory practices in order to build successful cross-curricular capabilities and capacities. In electronics courses there is a need to have practical experiences, the benefits of electronics laboratory practices are widely known for professionals and necessary for any person who seeks for a broad comprehension of the real-time performance beyond the ideal modelling. Therefore, when designing any electronics course, the laboratory practices are one of the basis on which the learning is established. New areas of application outside the University, regarding informal education, long-life learning or Senior education are everyday more attractive for users, students and teacher, as well as the increasing importance of STEM education in medium and high schools bring new areas of use of the remote instrumentation and laboratories as well as new software/virtual tools and apps. Nowadays, there is an extensive variety for providing theoretical contents in on-line learning (videos, documents, tutorials, scaffolding activities, peer-to-peer reviews, forums, etc.) to students, using traditional digital media (Learning Objects or Open CourseWare) as well as less traditional media as MOOCs (or variations as SPOCs or MOOLs). These tools, by an efficiently and appropriate selection from professors and use from students, can complement or replace successfully face-to-face education, as well as student-to-student support using the principle of peer-to-peer collaboration is highly increasing. The use of remote laboratories, virtual laboratories, MOOCs environment as well as new on-line learning applications are the key of this Special Session inside the REV 2016 conference.