Synchronous Tele-Tutorial Support in a

Traditional laboratories in engineering education are supervised by a tutor. Students can get feedback on their progress and hints when in need of help from the tutor. Often the tutor will grade the laboratory work. This support is also needed when students work with a remotely controlled laboratory. We believe that live audio-video is a natural way for tutors and students to communicate over a distance. The tutor should be able to see the students ’ computer screen to understand the work situation. We have built a remote laboratory to teach remote maintenance and real-time Java programming of embedded systems. It supports synchronous audio-video communication with the tutor. Application sharing is provided by an external tool. The laboratory is used by students in electrical engineering and computer science. The educational concept is problem-based and self-directed learning. Students work in groups of two with the experiment and write a program that controls the deflection unit of a laser system and generates a picture. They observe the generated picture and the laboratory devices by a user-controlled web cam. We want to make student