Experience with Abrupt Transition to Remote Teaching of Embedded Systems

TL;DR

The paper discusses a successful, low-effort transition to remote embedded systems teaching during COVID-19, highlighting remote hardware access as a viable alternative to traditional in-person labs.

Contribution

It provides a detailed evaluation of remote hardware access for embedded systems education, demonstrating its effectiveness and ease of implementation during abrupt course transitions.

Findings

Remote hardware access is a viable teaching method.

The approach requires minimal maintenance and existing open technologies.

Both students and teachers found the method effective.

Abstract

Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, many university courses had to abruptly transform to enable remote teaching. Adjusting courses on embedded systems and micro-controllers was extra challenging since interaction with real hardware is their integral part. We start by comparing our experience with four basic alternatives of teaching embedded systems: 1) interacting with hardware at school, 2) having remote access to hardware, 3) lending hardware to students for at-home work and 4) virtualizing hardware. Afterward, we evaluate in detail our experience of the fast transition from traditional, offline at-school hardware programming course to using remote access to real hardware present in the lab. The somewhat unusual remote hardware access approach turned out to be a fully viable alternative for teaching embedded systems, enabling a relatively low-effort transition. Our setup is based on existing solutions and stable open technologies without the need for custom-developed applications that require high maintenance. We evaluate the experience of both the students and teachers and condense takeaways for future courses. The specific environment setup is available online as an inspiration for others.