Electronic engineering laboratories : to flip or not to flip?

![CDATA[CONTEXT Except for a few positive highlights, the year 2020 has been mostly dreadful, especially in Australia - first the drought, followed by bushfires, and then COVID-19, the latter alone is carving a hole in Australian universities' finances as much as $19billion in 3 years. (Hurley, 2020). International student enrolments decreasing together with travel restrictions as well as necessity to comply with physical distancing and additional disinfection have all played a role in this setback. In order to comply to physical distancing rules and social restrictions, the majority of the teaching have moved to online learning mode. This paper demonstrates how academics are coping with the so called "new normal" by 'flipping' the learning experience into the electronics labs. This is performed introducing the concept of "Lab-in-a-box' (a fully functional electronic lab condensed in the size of a small box). PURPOSE OR GOAL Accreditation of several engineering courses are highly dependent on laboratory practical experiments. Engineering graduates of the future need to be innovative, critical thinkers, able to create solutions to emerging challenges. The purpose of this exercise is to stimulate further investigations into alternative teaching delivery methods without compromising established quality learning outcomes, engineering graduate attributes, and accessibility to students. APPROACH Participating students purchased or obtained a 'lab box', and in conjunction with a suite of online and downloadable software, online videos and tutorials already made available by the School, conducted the laboratory experiments in their own time and pace. Contact sessions (via teleconference) were used to discuss their findings and lessons learnt; although Lab-in-a box is fully remote controllable, we have not used this feature yet, students share their screen and data streaming from their device via interactive teaching platforms. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES From a review of similar existing work in this subject area, we anticipate that students will embrace it when the all the planned changes are fully implemented. At present, we have migrated our units as prevalent online (still they fall under the paradigm of blended learning) using some of the resources mentioned with positive feedback and reviews from students and tutors. We also expect that this approach will be beneficial to mature age students and working professionals who may not be able to commit to physical lab attendance due to unit clashes and/or necessity to comply with social distancing rules. CONCLUSIONS From the preliminary results of our gradual shift to inverted learning using the lab in a box, especially given the current social restrictions worldwide we are cautiously confident that flipped learning will continue to feature prominently in engineering education. However, it needs to be carefully structured and applied to ensure that it yields the desired results.]]