A Prediction Model for Remote Lab Courses Designed upon the Principles of Education for Sustainable Development

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a cease to the physical-presence operation of many laboratory-based university courses. As a response, higher education courses turned into distance learning. Distance education can foster sustainability through resource savings offered by the benefits of technology use. Therefore, there is a necessity to establish a pathway for sustainability practices concerning the increasing distance education enrollment and technological progress. Under the previous concept, this research paper presents a remote lab for the “Data Acquisition Systems” course, delivered during the pandemic as the digital twin of its respective conventional lab. This remote lab was designed on the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) principles to help students develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration competencies. This paper aims to develop a concrete framework for identifying factors that critically affect students’ performance during remote lab courses. The analysis is based on students’ engagement data collected by the NI-ELVIS remote lab measurement system during the spring academic semester of 2020 at the University of West Attica, Greece. Furthermore, the paper develops a competent prediction model for students at risk of failing the lab. The findings indicate that content comprehension and theory-exercise familiarization were the main risk factors in the case of the specific remote lab. In detail, a unit increase in content comprehension led to a 2.7 unit decrease in the probability of the risk occurrence. In parallel, a unit increase in theory familiarization through exercises led to a 3.2 unit decrease in the probability of the risk occurrence. The findings also underlined that risk factors such as critical thinking were associated with ESD competencies. Besides this, the benefits of delivering distance-learning labs according to the proposed methodology include environmental benefits by contributing to resource and energy savings since students who are about to fail can be located early and assisted.