key: cord-0695573-1kco0j4t
authors: Glassey, Jarka; Magalhães, Fernão D.
title: Virtual labs – love them or hate them, they are likely to be used more in the future
date: 2020-07-22
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1016/j.ece.2020.07.005
sha: 8c397927e591ab0890aa91070af2887672c33166
doc_id: 695573
cord_uid: 1kco0j4t

nan

Virtual labs -love them or hate them, they are likely to be used more in the future The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically and very rapidly changed the higher education landscape. Whilst the economies around the world are slowly opening up at the time of writing, Universities in all countries are preparing for ensuring high quality teaching, learning and assessment in post-COVID-19 affected environments. Most academics had to rapidly adapt to the online delivery of material and assessment during lockdowns of various levels of stringency in various countries and these emergency measures addressed the immediate needs to some extent. Education for Chemical Engineers journal is currently preparing a special issue on digital tools used successfully in this 'emergency mode delivery' to enable the community to learn from these examples. However, as we move forward, we need to plan for a much more effective online delivery and more imaginative assessment methods that would ensure the achievement of necessary learning outcomes with potentially limited physical contact.

Acquiring practical skills is a very important part of learning outcomes in any chemical engineering degree, as the accreditation guidelines of various accrediting bodies emphasise. Ensuring effective achievement of these skills with limited physical delivery will be particularly challenging. One possible means to help address this challenge is to use virtual lab experiments and simulations to enable the students to understand the concepts, important relationships between the variables and the potential impact on experimental rig operation before physically carrying out an experiment in a laboratory within a much reduced timeline. Whilst the special issue on digitalisation will highlight new tools being developed in this area (for example virtual and augmented reality), there are tools already tested in chemical engineering education for the delivery of practical skills, simulations and active methodologies improving student learning experience. This special issue provides a selection of articles covering these aspects of chemical engineering education that we hope will help practitioners in developing their own resilient solutions to effective education in the context of restricted physical interaction with students.

Remote and virtual labs may contribute to the development of important practical skills, although arguably they cannot replace the physical interaction of the student with equipment. The University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, has been trailblazing the area of remotely accessible real-world laboratory experiments since 2003, in the context of a joint initiative with MIT. In 2016 the Cambridge weblabs team reported their collaboration with Siemens on the implementation of an online-controlled chemical reactor, using state of the art industrial process control software (Botero et al., 2016) .

Whilst performing laboratory experiments may be severely limited or impossible, either physically or remotely, students may still become familiar with the procedures, equipment operation and safety guidelines via online screencasts combined with assessment quizzes. This has been used at the National University of Singapore as a pre-laboratory training tool, but its usefulness can be extended to other contexts (Gautam et al., 2016) .

Virtual, simulator-based, laboratories can be a simpler and less costly alternative to remotely interactive experiments. Ramirez and co-workers described a set of six virtual experiments based on real-life problems, which were tested by undergraduate students taking the chemical reaction engineering course at the National University of Colombia. Their approach used industrial simulation software based on chemical kinetic reaction models. They proposed open problems involving not only reaction engineering concepts, but also economic or environmental considerations (Ramirez et al., 2020) .

Virtual experiments were implemented at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, as a complement to traditional hands-on practice on electrolysis of water for hydrogen production. The J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f simulations enable data acquisition under operating conditions that cannot be reproduced in the real system, therefore enriching the students' experience (Dominguez et al., 2018) .

At the University of Coimbra, Portugal, an online platform is used to integrate different contents (fundamentals, case studies, simulators, videos), covering main topics in a Chemical Engineering curriculum: unit operations, chemical reaction, biological processes, and process systems engineering. The purpose is to provide a means for promoting students' autonomy, in the context of self-regulated study (Granjo et al., 2020) .

When considering simulator-based experiments, it is worth referring to the study by Zendler and Greiner, at the Ludwigsburg University of Education, Germany, which compared experimental and computer simulation approaches for the same learning content. The results showed that simulation performs similarly to the experimental method, despite operating on different cognitive levels.

Simulation work is deemed particularly important for promoting self-directed learning (Zendler and Greiner, 2020).

Even though not directly related to laboratory activities, the concept of virtual experimentation has been extended to virtual field trips to industrial plants. This approach has been implemented at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, in order to provide the necessary pre-knowledge to students in a way that maximises learning during a real field-trip. However, it can actually be an interesting alternative when the real experience is not achievable (Seifan et al., 2019) .

In a distance-learning context, flipped classroom can be an effective strategy to promote active learning. Students are introduced to content before scheduled classes, using different media, so that in-class time is focused on individual and/or group problem-solving activities, with support from the teacher. A successful example of flipped classroom has been reported by Li and Huang from the Villanova University, USA, for improving Matlab skills for process control simulation and design (Li and Huang, 2017) .

Cambridge weblabs: A process control system using industrial standard SIMATIC PCS

A virtual lab as a complement to traditional hands-on labs: Characterization of an alkaline electrolyzer for hydrogen production

Enhancing laboratory experience through e-lessons

Enhancing the autonomy of students in chemical engineering education with LABVIRTUAL platform

An inverted classroom approach to educate MATLAB in chemical process control

A Virtual Laboratory to support Chemical Reaction Engineering using real-life problems and industrial software

The effect of virtual field trip as an introductory tool for an engineering real field trip

The effect of two instructional methods on learning outcome in chemistry education: The experiment method and computer simulation