Creating a new synergy on technical and vocational education via a general purpose computer interface unit

This study is focused on improving and sustaining the analog experiment sets used in the laboratory applications of technical and vocational education (TVE) particularly in Electrical and Electronics by computerizing them to extend their usage period. The study is mainly about the improvement of the V-LAB and D-LAB interfaces. As the distance education has been increasingly and widely adopted in the recent years, it became apparent that some laboratory applications can also be adapted into the distance education via improvements including computerization, Internet connectivity, and remote monitoring technologies. This article describes the technical capabilities of the improved analog experiment laboratory systems and discusses the limitations and potential further improvements. The present work will also be a good reference to vocational education. (c) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 20: 364373, 2012