From laboratory education to laboratory edu-action: evaluation of a redesigned lab course for prospective technology teachers and resulting demands for cyber-physical ‘remotification’

Laboratory courses have become an integral part of engineering education worldwide. Moreover, `megatrends' such as globalization, demographic change, and increasing digitalization are key drivers of flux in the areas of people, technology, and organization and thus also have an impact on laboratory education, especially in the field of engineering. These fast moving changes require that prospective workers as well as teachers possess a higher level of independency and responsibility. This raises the question how the related needed self-learning competencies can be nurtured and developed during study time. The paper presents first results of a qualitative evaluation of a redesigned laboratory course for prospective technology teachers based on essential principles of modern laboratory didactics in order to allow students to experiment more actively and learn in a more self-directed way. As evaluation method, guided expert interviews were chosen as the most appropriate approach. The main result is that self-directed laboratory learning helps students to learn taking over more responsibility for their own learning processes and successes. Moreover, it can increase students' motivation to learn. Finally, to reduce students' attendance obligation and to foster self-directed learning as a precondition for lifelong learning, the deployment and implementation of VISIR, a remotely accessible online experimentation facility, will take place during the first quarter of 2019. The paper closes with further research questions on the digital transformation and its impact on designing online experimentation learning by deploying cyber-physical `remotification'.