The National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) Vicilogic team developed the first scalable, online, assessment and prototyping platform for practical digital logic hardware and computer architecture design. The team, led by Dr. Fearghal Morgan, secured funding through the Enterprise Ireland commercialisation fund to develop the platform further. As part of the development strategy Vicilogic released a tender to secure the development of an instructional strategy that provides the underpinning framework to integrate the remote platform into a well-structured eLearning solution. Learnovate secured the project through the tender process and successfully completed the strategy in May 2014.
In our initial analysis, we investigated the challenges of the traditional teaching approach to Digital Logic, a series of lectures followed by hands-on practice in a physical lab. We then identified the ideal ingredients for an effective pedagogical solution for teaching and learning Digital Logic and concluded that the proposed Vicilogic platform supports all of these features.
From our experience and further investigation into solutions in the domain we developed a strategy to seamlessly embed the remote lab in scaffolded e-Learning courses, offering authentic, guided and independent practice opportunities.
In collaboration with the Vicilogic team, Learnovate has provided a solid instructional strategy; a set of research-based best practice guidelines on the general interface, learner orientation, as well as the pedagogical model. In addition to the initial brief we have developed a social learning strategy to support peer-to-peer learning through Communities of Practice or tutor-driven collaborative learning. Last but not least, we developed an evaluation strategy that will help the Vicilogic team in the longer term to identify the effectiveness of their learning platform in comparison with traditional methods of teaching Digital Logic.
Vicilogic sought innovation support and Learnovate were happy to deliver.
“It has been a pleasure to work with the Learnovate team. We have been introduced to many interesting and powerful aspects of e-learning, including scaffolding, state of the art methods and tools for independent practice and assessment, and the important steps to evaluation of the Vicilogic platform. We are very encouraged that the State of the Art analysis performed by the Learnovate team has confirmed our Vicilogic strategy, and that the practical suggestions proposed by Learnovate will greatly enhance the Vicilogic platform. I hope and look forward to working with Learnovate again as Vicilogic develops.”
Electrical & Electronic Engineering, NUI Galway
