Hand-on skills training is an essentially significant component of many engineering courses, like robotics, electronics, mechanics and renewable energy. A major concern in online/distance engineering education is how can we overcome the problems associated with laboratory components of courses. In this proposal, a new eLearning pedagogical approach called flipped online laboratory is proposed and expected to be used in teaching robotics. The basic underlying idea is that an online (synchronous) laboratory could be conducted with the help of flipped (asynchronous) laboratory instructions for making students’ first robot. An online robotic laboratory, on the one hand, is planning to be constructed based on our real robotic laboratory with real robots and corresponding computers. The conventional robotic laboratory can be transformed to an online laboratory thanks to the cross platform remote control technique, where students could use their personal computers in distance to control the computers in the lab, further tuning and controlling the robot in real time. In this way, some distinct advantages to students could be cherished by avoiding healthy problems and safety problems compared to conventional labs. On the other hand, this proposal combines with flipped laboratory, which allows students to learn from videos of laboratory instructions before each online lab at their convenience. As a result, more efforts could be devoted into problem solving and students-instructor interaction in synchronous online laboratory. The method will demonstrate its effectiveness in the existing course (UGEB2303 Robots in Action) where students without technical background could build and manipulate their first robot via the flipped online robotics laboratory.
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