PARADIGM SHIFT IN REMOTE EDUCATION FOR THE LABORATORY: A SOCIAL APPROACH TO DISTANCE LEARNING Hanley, Richard With modern telecommunication tools the ability for two individuals to work together remotely has greatly improved. Moreover, there have been great strides made to improve handling medium to large groups of people in real time in remote settings, viz. the teleconference and webinar. However, the status of remote tools for laboratory environments where there is significant hardware and the individuals are more likely to talk amongst themselves in irregular patterns is not nearly as well studied. This thesis examines the way most laboratories in electrical engineering are setup, and creates a model for how to create a remote environment for distance learning. It then discusses the current state of the art, and how such an implementation of the model can be made with such tools. Finally a usability study of the implementation is examined. The primary result of the usability study is that when moving to a remote environment the social paradigm that students and instructors use is likely to change, and simply working on creating a virtual mirror to the laboratory may not work in the future. M.S. in Electrical Engineering, December 2011 Saniie, Jafar 2011-12 2011-12 Thesis application/pdf islandora:8941 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/2592 ECE / Electrical and Computer Engineering Illinois Institute of Technology en In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access