Iterative development of an engineering laboratory course: Insights after first iteration

With the new bachelor’s programme at our university a new engineering laboratory course was developed in an iterative design process framework. The main objectives for this course were to provide students a hands-on laboratory experience and give a possibility to utilize this experience in a real research project. This should be realized with reasonable teaching efforts while maintaining the high quality of teaching. Learning outcomes and teaching methods for the course are presented and reasoned in this paper. Feedback from the first implementation of the course is shown and evaluated. Some development actions for the next course offering are concluded. The main finding of the development work is that unpredictable issues will arise when holding student laboratories, for example malfunctioning software and hardware and students’ inability to run experiments because of too light instructions. It was also found out that more effort should be put on teaching students the necessary skills related to software and conducting tests in a laboratory. In the end, an advanced model of iterative design process for course development is proposed.