Enriched Blended Learning through Virtual Experience in Microprocessors and Microcontrollers Course

Microprocessors and microcontrollers is a course that demands concurrent delivery of pragmatic and dogmatic approaches to the students in order to ensure effective learning. Online sessions and active learning for such courses pose challenges to both teachers and students, especially during this pandemic period. In order to combat these challenges, and to kindle the interest among the students in learning the course, a new methodology which supports blended learning through virtual experience is presented in this paper. The proposed methodology was implemented for the third year engineering students of circuit branches. This paper highlights the effectiveness of using open source emulating environments like Edsim51 and EMU8086 for providing a virtual laboratory experience to the students. These virtual environment provides a complete visualization of the internal functionality of the microprocessor/microcontroller architecture, and also enhances practical exposure of the students. In order to further augment the students’ affinity towards the course, the teacher adopts different pedagogical approaches, which is best suited for ICT based blended learning in the online teaching environment. The assessment of this virtual experience is carried out using different online assessment components such as quizzes, assignments as concept maps/videos shared by the students, mini projects etc. Based on the assessment results, an analysis is carried out and it shows significant improvement in student engagement, in depth understanding of the course and improvement in programming skills of the students. Thus, this experience not only acts as a countermeasure to the lack of real time laboratory sessions but also promotes ‘understanding by doing’, which seems almost impossible during this pandemic situation.