Innovative virtual labs prove a game changer for hands-on experience

In years past, the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science     had been offering a photovoltaic (PV) lab course on campus during the summer to PhD students and professionals in the solar energy field. The opportunity to work in a lab was a particularly appreciated aspect of the course – but limited in the numbers it could accommodate. To be able to offer this experience to a larger number of learners, including those who, for whatever reason, would not be able to travel to Delft, the faculty developed the course as a successful online program for professional education. 

But the welcoming of wider groups of appreciative lifelong learners was just the beginning of that success story. Once the COVID-19 pandemic struck and restrictions on campus teaching meant no access to labs, the availability of the photovoltaic (PV) Lab online courses proved a game changer. 

Gaining lab experience at home

Under the guidance of associate professors Olindo Isabella and René vas Swaaij, and supported by the Extension School, doctoral researcher Robin Vismara and colleagues in the course team were able to offer the two courses that make up the online program Virtual Lab: Photovoltaic Conversion, Systems and Components to our own TU Delft students as part of their on-campus master’s degree. Considering that the courses are mandatory for doing a graduation project in the PV field, the value of this offering quickly becomes apparent. Two additional PV online laboratories – making up the Project Integrating Renewable Energy course – were developed in close succession and offered to our bachelor students; these have been then upgraded to match the demands of professionals and will be made available in September also to external learners through the online program Virtual Lab: Soar and Chemical Energy Conversions for Green Hydrogen.

“Having developed the online program was a heaven-sent solution once the pandemic restricted our ability to teach on campus. Students need to get hands-on experience in the lab and we were able to continue to offer this valuable part of their study program,” recounts Robin.

“All participants have been very positive about the courses and the experience of the Virtual Labs – they found it really great to be able to try out experiments and simulations online,” says Robin. “Both TU Delft students and working professionals remarked on how realistic the experience was, in particular in the rendition of system components such as cables, light sources and photovoltaic modules. When developing the course, we worked with beta testers who had followed the on-campus course in the lab to ensure they would find it very life-like and that the physical laboratory environment was well translated to the virtual one”, he explains.

Successful off-campus solution for campus students

Under normal circumstances (pre-pandemic), the faculty was already experiencing problems in meeting the demand for lab practice: with 40 places per quarter available for a demand of up to 80 students, the teaching staff could not offer the practical experience to all in a timely manner and had to institute a waiting list and selection criteria. Furthermore, the time demand on lecturers and student assistants was also high due to a heavy assessment load (i.e. correction of students’ written reports).  

Developing these two  Virtual Labs programs provided an excellent solution: it enabled the faculty to meet the demand from students and offered a flexible schedule as an experiment could be carried out throughout a whole week if needed – and not be restricted to a specific time slot. In addition, it helped reduce staff workload and removed the need for report writing as the assessment became remote and online.

A very participatory course

“These courses are very practical” Robin continues, “there is no passive participation as there could be in watching a video or reading an article: learners are engaged in an active process, searching for information in order to reply to questions and complete the assignments”. 

“TU Delft students tend to be better prepared because they would have followed a series of other courses that prepared them for lab work, and they could make advanced connections with knowledge they already had. On the other hand, professionals would ask questions that were more theoretical and wanted to go deeper into the topic of the experiments. Generally speaking, one could say that students questions were more finalised to finding the right answer to the lab test, whilst professionals asked more theoretical questions for a deeper understanding”, he remarks.

Different engagement across learner groups

“With regards to learner engagement, we noticed some differences. For example, bachelor students in electrical engineering taking the Virtual Project Integrating Renewable Energy course (as part of their minor) may need more guidance and support (typically four hours twice a week on a video-chat in Brightspace). Whilst master students following the Virtual PV Lab, able to draw on their study experience, are more autonomous and quicker to use the course discussion boards also to contribute answers to questions from peers”, Robin reflects. “Another difference is that professionals in the online programs would post less but dialogue more, and have interesting conversations also regarding the applicability and connection to real work cases”.

Making mistakes is crucial

“Developing these online programs necessitated looking at the whole on-campus course with fresh eyes, both in terms of the creation of the virtual lab and of the assessment. We needed to test that all requirements were met and that the platform was intuitive and easy enough to use, as well as making sure that the learning objectives could be achieved by moving to online,” he says.  

“In real life, making mistakes is a crucial part of the lab experience, for example a wrong cable connection, and in a physical lab there are also various sources of uncertainty in terms of data gathering, such as noise and different ambient conditions” explains Robin, “and although these aspects are of course less easy to recreate and implement in a controlled, online environment, we spent time and effort to ensure the application developers had first-hand experience of the experiments we asked them to program – we even brought them to the lab on campus to perform the tasks together to better identify any roadblocks.”

“We worked closely with virtual reality experts (at TU Delft the VR group and the NewMedia Centre, and the The Hague-based company DutchVR) and gave them very detailed information and procedural descriptions of each step and action that needed to be carried out for each lab task. A key aspect of this was the clarity of the instructions that learners had to follow and we ended up providing these online, rather than via a PDF document, as this worked better from the user-perspective”, he recalls.

“But was we didn’t expect was how long 3D objects and environments can take to recreate online! So the first experiment took the longest, also because we were preparing and finalising the user interface and appearance. Compared to creating the graphics and the visualisations, we found that embedding the scientific material within the virtual laboratory applications did not require too much work once the structure for the first experiment was in place. However, spending time at the beginning doing this right does help to speed things up later. In fact, it was great that we were even able to finish the development of one of the courses two months ahead of schedule”.

What’s next?

Looking to the not-too-distant future, Robin and colleagues intend to continue to offer the Virtual Labs to TU Delft students once we can resume teaching on campus – probably as a combination of physical and online education: “It is important for students to acquire the necessary manual skills in the campus lab, but equally it is good to take advantage of the benefits of the online format, such as access for a higher number of students, the online assessment and more flexibility”.

“Later on, we could even think about expanding the virtual laboratory applications for experiments that are not currently possible in a physical lab. We could consider trying out tasks on a bigger scale, for example for power plants with hundreds of thousands of PV modules to be connected and with different types of equipment for each plant. This could be an interesting development to explore,” he concludes.

Do you want to know more about online education at TU Delft? Are you interested in developing online courses and/or virtual labs? Visit the Extension School website or email extension-school@tudelft.nl