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Remote laboratories are an increasingly prevalent instructional tool for undergraduate engineering laboratory classes. This increased prevalence brings with it a need to change the model of how remote laboratories are developed. The earlier remote laboratories were developed by individual academics combining their discipline-specific skills with their own ability to implement remote operation. This “cottage industry” model allows for significant local innovation; however it does not support widespread or sustainable implementation of remote laboratories. In order to make remote laboratories a mainstream technology, it is essential that potential academic users are well informed and well supported in considering remote laboratories. There are some well-developed and well-established systems for controlling equipment remotely; what has been missing has been the organizational scaffolding to facilitate the engagement of academics. This paper reports on a resource kit developed by the Australian Labshare project that provides this assistance. This resource kit is intended to provide academics with the resources, information and tools that they need to get started with remote laboratories – building them, using them, and understanding their educational outcomes.

Milestone based marking is an asynchronous assessment approach used for semester-long projects. By providing students with a fine-grained marking scheme – the milestones – at the start of semester, and allowing students to claim these marks at any point in the semester, students can better plan and self-manage their learning. The milestone-based assessment approach is intended to motivate the students by making the assessment process transparent and accessible. To determine whether or not this has occurred, it is necessary to evaluate the initiative through the lens of motivation theories. Since the connection between motivation and learning is well understood, looking specifically at motivation should shed light on how deeply students are learning in this new approach. In this paper, student data from three semesters of implementation is reviewed and explained using various motivation theories: Self-Determination Theory, Flow Theory, Self-Efficacy Theory, Goal Theory, and Expectancy-Value Theory. Results show that many of these theories have opportunity to explain the students’ engagement and learning and provide insight into how better to examine student motivation in upcoming semesters.

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development: vol. 22, (dlps) 17063888.0022.022, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.17063888.0022.022, This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu to use this work in a way not covered by the license.