2007-2014 PhD: Generic Design of a e-TP configuration tool

Student: Dr Saher ARNOUS

Summary
Powered by the technological advances of the “Information and communication sciences and technologies”, the Electronic Laboratory for practical training “ELab” (also known as ELab hands-on training) became an insisting teaching mode especially in the technical and scientific disciplines. However, several ELab modes were emerged, led by the pedagogical variety in engineering sciences: virtual ELab, remote ELab, Local Elab, etc. the two last ELab modes require the use of hardware devices (pedagogical models, measuring devices, robots, etc.). Almost in most cases, those devices need to be reconfigured according to pedagogical objectives. For complex systems, like Automated Production Systems, this reconfiguration process requires technical skills which the instructor does not have systematically. This imposes that a technician should be available, or the usage of the pedagogical platform will be limited to certain number of skilled instructors.

Accordingly, this research aims to facilitate the reconfiguration process of complex systems (particularly the APS) under ELabs. For that, a first survey designated to the users of «AIP-Priméca-RAO», located at the INSA de Lyon, had specified the needs and constraints related to a platform encountering this problem. It has been found that beyond the (re)configuration, a time wasting for the users was detected due to the absence of a common tool for pedagogical resources management. This work fed the design of software tool managing an editorial chain aiming at simplifying creation, edition, assembling, organization, reuse of different resources that can be exploited in an ELab session. This tool is intended as well to improve the autonomy of the instructor during the preparation of an ELab session, by reducing the required time to configure this session. This implies to automate the reconfiguration process of an APS supporting the ELab, and publishing the pedagogical learning scenarios on a Learning Management System (LMS).

In order to validate this design, a prototype has been developed and tested on real cases ELabs.
Subsequently, this tool could be made more generic so that it can serve Elabs of different
disciplines

Keywords: E-Labs, E-Learning, System Engineering, Learning Management System, Authoring System, Automated Production System

Report (in French) available in PDF here

Supervised by Dr Arnaud Lelevé and Prof. Patrick Prévot.

Started in 2007, defended in Sept 2014

Communications: [ARN1-09a, ARN-09b, LEL-09, ARN-11, ARN-12]