The founding & expansion of a remote learning lab from a long-trusted educational partner

In early 2020 the world changed considerably, and students, professors, and the learning/teaching communities were among those most affected. Many learning labs were closed worldwide with no notice, interrupting engineering educations. OPAL-RT has a long history and investment of time and cooperation with the educational community, and we were able to marshal our resources in short order to assist.

In Fall 2020, a Virtual Lab pilot program was launched, consisting of OPAL-RT courseware, to help mediate the physical distancing constraints as a first step–but also to help implement the concept of reverse teaching, namely flipped classrooms and labs. In this context, that means applying hands-on practice sessions to the classroom portion of the course, while assigning readings and other classwork to students at home.

It has long been a cornerstone of pedagogical theory that we retain a great deal more of what we actively participate in when learning. The Cone of Learning, below, illustrates these concepts.

In practice, what this looks like is: students do their lab sessions first, in the safety of their own homes, on their own computers, and at their own learning pace—and allow themselves in the process to make mistakes, break virtual fuses, etc. Once they are later in front of the physical test bench, they know exactly what to expect as a result, and how to deal with the hardware they have at hand.

OPAL-RT has been developing courseware since 2014 and incorporating these principles. We started initially with our suite of Power Electronics courseware. Then in 2017, we pooled our efforts to team up with Professor Viarouge and his students from Laval University in Quebec, Canada, to further develop courseware in Electric Motors and Power Systems. It should go without saying that these efforts are win-win for all parties, as we learn more about how students themselves learn, and they are able to avail themselves of world-class real-time interactive simulation concepts in action and solvers/platforms. (This is as opposed to the offline non-interactive simulation they might usually have access to in classrooms and labs.) Over the course of the pilot program, the professors adopted our courseware, adapting it to their needs, and developing new experiments, and sharing that further development with us.

Five universities and colleges have so far participated in our pilot project: Laval University and Collège Montmorency in Quebec, École Navale in France, École supérieure d’ingénieurs de Beyrouth, and the Lebanese University in Lebanon.