- This full paper addresses an innovative practice in the experimental teaching/learning in Engineering courses. Engineering is a practical profession where doing is the key. Experimental work and the immersing in the lab environment (hands-on, simulations, remote labs) helps students to construct and strengthen their knowledge. The VISIR+ Project (ERASMUS+), launched in November 2015 and concluded in Abril 2018, intended to disseminate VISIR - Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (the most used remote lab in electric and electronics area of expertise) in Latin American countries (Argentina and Brazil) by installing a system in five Higher Educational Institutions. It involved 13 educational institutions, 25 different courses, several of them with successive didactical implementations. It comprised 49 teachers and 1,595 students. During the project about 27 research papers were published disseminating the projects' results. At the end of the project, the expectations were that the impact could remain in the long-term promoting VISIR remote lab and the dissemination of good practices. The project ended four years ago, and each installed VISIR system continued to promote teaching diversification using different experimental resources (including VISIR) then contributing to student learning. The aim of this work is to understand the impact of these didactical practices while using VISIR in these last years. This study was based on a questionnaire complemented with an interview with each person of contact. The results point to an increase of VISIR's usage in almost all institutions, particularly during the pandemic period. Overall, the educational impact involved more than 23 different institutions, 45 courses (most of them with several editions), 118 teachers and 4,866 students. The impact in the scientific community implied additional 31 publications with VISIR as its main core. These numbers support the sustainability of the VISIR+ project over the years, positively contributing to a more diversified engineering education of these students and their experimental competences development.

Control courses are important parts of the curricula of Control & Automation Engineering and Electrical Engineering. In this area, as in Engineering curricula in general, experimentation is of paramount importance. Engineering curricula have always had many lab classes for students to perform experiments – lab classes were hosted in traditional brick and mortar environments. The current status of technology allows for experiments to remotely be performed. Remote Labs are used in many institutions over the world as well as Virtual Labs. Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, these solutions have gained greater importance. This work addresses the use of an Electric and Electronic Circuit Lab in a Control Course to perform Analog Simulations. It introduces the characteristics of the Remote Lab as well as the way it was used to enhance the learning of systems of different natures. This Remote Lab had been in use at the institution since the second semester of 2016 but in Electric Circuits and General Electricity courses. The Institution has been implementing other Remote Labs too. This work focuses the school years of 2020 and 2021, and addresses the plans for the near future. The main topics to be discussed are: the context at the University, the Control Course, the technological tools that have been in use for many years and how Remote Labs in general have been used. VISIR – Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality, the Remote Lab for Electric and Electronic Circuits is briefly described.

We present a cost-effective, feasible solution to situations where students cannot perform in-person laboratory experiments, such as in a pandemic scenario, in the context of electric and electronic circuits. A hybrid combination of simulations, experiments in a remote laboratory and at-home assignments in do-it-yourself electronic kits was developed and implemented in an Electric and Electronic Circuits Laboratory course over three semesters. We show that most competencies that are usually expected to be developed in such courses do not suffer any penalties when our approach is employed.

This paper presents a proposal of a module to support self-regulated learning by undergraduate engineering students. The module will be based on concept maps in order to efficiently organize and manage the core conceptual keystones of the syllabus of each course. Each student will be linked to the concept map to record all topics that are covered (with dates and assigned grades) and the ones that are pending. To implement self-regulated learning, this will be shown to each student. The instructor will be able to examine the concept maps for all students in the class. The module will be a part of the current learning management system and institutional repository platform, that is also a service broker for remote labs. This proposal has started being implemented and a pilot project begins in March 2020.

This work addresses an extension in the use of Concept Maps related to Linear Time-Invariant Systems in some Engineering curricula. The original work concerned the use of Concept Maps to define the granularity of Learning Objects on this discipline. The objective was to develop reusable and shareable Learning Objects. While the work was under development, the potential of Concept Maps to examine curricula containing courses related to Linear Time-Invariant Systems became obvious. Thus the extension to curricula analysis had two goals - identify potential users of the Learning Objects and map redundancies and holes in the curricula. A by-product was an interesting outcome - the mapping of all courseware related to the topics on Linear Time-Invariant Systems available on the Maxwell System, the university Institutional Repository.