Practical courses without presence - is that possible?

Abstract

Practical courses are a central component of engineering education. In the context of face-to-face courses, such practicals in lectures with large numbers of students are usually carried out in densely occupied practical rooms with groups of well over 10 students, in order to be able to guarantee the distribution of the practicals over the semester at all. Under pandemic conditions, these face-to-face practicals were no longer feasible, which meant that there was either the possibility of (i) cancelling the practicals, (ii) designing them as computer or demonstration experiments in a video stream, or (iii) looking for new concepts with which real experimentation at home could become possible. Since the failure would have led to significant disruptions in the course of studies and pure computer experiments would have been detrimental to experimental training, a Praktikum@home structure was developed at the Chair of Magnetofluiddynamics, Measuring and Automation Technology at the TU Dresden, which both transports the required teaching content and enables experimental work. The concepts developed and the experiences made with them are the subject of this article.