ABSTRACT
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online teaching methods have gained more interest. Most formats of teaching can be easily transferred into an online format from a technical point of view. However, this is more difficult for practical courses in a laboratory. Together with partners from three European universities, we tackled the issue of providing a practical online course for higher education levels in the framework of the EuroTeQ university. In this work, we present our concept of the course and discuss the course goals and further improvements. We tested the remote lab setting in order to offer the course on a yearly basis in future. The remote lab was focused on energy engineering and was open to students from different engineering disciplines and countries. The course was comprised of three blocks, each consisting of one lecture on the broader context of the topic and one experimental laboratory session. The experimental session was streamed via a video broadcasting service. Students were required to either deliver a written report or to write a newspaper article for each of the three blocks. The learning outcome of the course was that students on the one hand learn about the technologies discussed in the course and on the other hand learn about intercultural communication skills. The goal was to show the diversity of technologies and to show the significance of each technology for a specific country. The online experimental sessions proved to deliver a clear explanation of the topic for the students when provided with sufficient course material adapted to online formats. Contrary, keeping a high level of interaction with students during remote experiments was found most challenging. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The European Nuclear Experimental Educational Platform - ENEEP is currently being established by five European educational and research organizations in the framework of a Horizon 2020 project, initiated in 2019. The ENEEP partner institutions are the Jozef Stefan Institute (JSI, Slovenia), the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava (STU, Slovak Republic), the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU, Czech Republic), Technische Universitat Wien (TU Wien, Austria) and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME, Hungary). ENEEP is intended as an open educational platform, offering experimental hands-on education activities at the ENEEP partner facilities. ENEEP education activities will be offered in different formats (group and individual) and are targeted at university students at all educational levels and young professionals in the nuclear field. This paper gives an overview of the ENEEP project activities and the progress achieved thus far, highlighting the experimental capabilities which will be offered. In the first implementation phase, ENEEP will be based on a comprehensive set of experiments comprising the basics in Reactor Physics and Nuclear Engineering curricula, as well as more specific experiments focusing on particular aspects investigated phenomena, types and working principles of detectors, etc. Subsequently, novel education activities will be introduced and implemented in ENEEP, following scientific development in nuclear science and technology and nuclear instrumentation detectors, stemming from research activities. Attention will be devoted to the development and optimization of remote education capabilities at the ENEEP partner institutions, of particular relevance during the current Covid-19 pandemic, which is responsible for major changes in education activities worldwide.