University of Massachusetts Lowell ECE has been one of the early adopters of personal learning devices in our teaching laboratories. Students purchase the Analog Discovery Kit (ADK2) as first year students and use it throughout their engineering education. This device, when connected to a laptop computer, provides students with the equivalent of a standard lab bench consisting of two channel oscilloscope, function generator, logic analyzer, voltmeter, and power supply. The software GUI emulates the functions of standard lab equipment. Prior to the Covid shutdown, students used the ADK as a supplement to their standard lab benches to work on circuits and electronics laboratories either at home or in the lab.  We were one of the first schools to directly integrate personal learning devices such as this into our laboratory curricula.

Then came the Covid shutdown in March 2020. Within a week, we instantly switched from a hybrid lab bench/ADK centric lab curriculum to one totally based on the ADK. For the next 1.5 years we operated in a remote lab format in which students purchased the ADK, we shipped to them a parts kit, and we performed the laboratory exercises over zoom in a virtual lab setting. In fact, our junior cohort will be showing up this fall, never having been physically in the lab.

Unlike many schools that shifted to a “simulation” based laboratory curriculum we maintained a fully hardware centric lab curriculum throughout the pandemic. Students performed basically the same lab exercises remotely that they would do in the lab. We demonstrated our personal learning device-based curriculum in a number of ECEDHA lab manager workshops, and many schools emulated what we were doing.   In this paper we will share some key findings that we will take as we enter a new phase of the pandemic with students returning to campus and the lab (at least for now).

Our general observation is that remote labs can work, just like flipped classes work, just not for everyone.  We will discuss our plan for re-integrating personal devices with conventional labs and dealing with the fact that our junior cohort has never been in the lab. We will take what worked with remote labs and combine it with what works with on-campus labs.