VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS - A CHANCE TO TEACH ENGINEERING AT A DISTANCE
Most modern mechanical engineering courses follow the life cycle of future product. Product life cycle consists of well-known phases: design, analysis, manufacturing, quality control. Not all of these phases are easy to implement through distance learning courses; expensive laboratory equipment is usually unavailable to distance learning students. Virtual instruments developed with National Instruments' software "LabVIEW" give opportunity to students to have powerfull instrumentation within the software, while measurement is performed in a laboratory. Virtual instruments even enable students to build their own instruments, using software-simulated signals. This paper shows how virtual instruments can be implemented in distance engineering education.