Introduction of Online Labs to Enhance the Quality of the Real-Time Systems Course

This paper presents the implementation of the fully online Real-time systems course in the Software Engineering Technology program. The highlight of this course is the improvement by including MATLAB Simulink labs to give the students hands-on training and enhance their online learning experience. This is a very pertinent strategy because students enrolling in these programs have a natural aptitude for experiential learning and insist on seeing the applicability of concepts to real problems. In presenting the evolution of this course from no-labs to several online labs, we demonstrate the positive impact this has had on student learning.