ABSTRACT
Most educators look for experiential learning elements to engage students through interactive concept practice, thus leading their students to reach improved levels of comprehension. The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique challenge for instructors forcing them to adjust their laboratory-based courses and to adapt to a new remote educational medium involving experiential learning. Many innovative ways came to light and were implemented by educators to overcome this challenge. This includes simulations, recorded experiments, and live experiments run by the instructor and watched by students remotely, to name a few. Along the same line of efforts to alleviate challenges to experiential learning imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a remotely accessible experimental system was developed, tested, and employed to provide students an interactive and live hands-on learning experience. A heat exchanger system was built and tested with active involvement from students. The system was tested for remote access through an interactive computer interface to run an experiment and obtain measurements of various in-process parameters of the heat exchanger using a data acquisition system. After completion of the testing phase, the system was integrated over two academic terms in a thermal fluid laboratory course. Indirect and direct assessment of students' comprehension and engagement as they used the remote laboratory activity was carried out to evaluate the experiential learning experience for the students. The student feedback regarding remotely operating the heat exchanger system was mostly positive and the direct assessment data shows that the learning experience for students was not impeded during the pandemic due to the utilization of the new device. The system will continue to be implemented face-to-face with option of remote access available in future course offerings. Such a remote laboratory experience has shown great potential to complement and even enhance experiential learning experience of students in a laboratory course. Future plans include building and integrating more similar experimental devices and setups to enhance our preparedness for the unknown. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.