Effective Academia-industry Collaboration for Virtual Instrumentation Teaching and Certification Program

Key point in enabling smooth transition for students from higher education towards the work environment, is represented by a permanent dialogue, exchange of ideas and common projects between the two parties. A positive outcome of such collaborations leads to bridging a gap between academic requirements and applied knowledge using industry standard tools in the workplace. The paper highlights the experiences from the last four years of implementation of the LabVIEW Academy program of the National Instruments company at the Department of Automatic Control and Industrial Informatics, UPB, within the laboratory for Intelligent Measurement Technologies and Transducers (iMTT). The program involves using up-to-date hardware and software for studying and developing complex data acquisition systems and stand-alone virtual instrumentation projects and a commitment to continuous improvement. Industrial software engineering topics are taught and implemented with immediate impact. At a higher level, this focuses on applying modern methods of teaching, evaluation and certification, while making intensive use of eLearning tools. We first describe the program structure, requirements, and benefits along with co-existence with the academic curricula and implementation details. The case study is performed on a relevant sample of more than one thousand students at both the bachelor and master’s level and coming from different engineering areas. Student feedback is collected and analysed and means to incorporate this information into subsequent program improvements are discussed. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation are carried out. We underline the most valuable conclusions towards best practices in actually deploying such programs in specific and general cases for broad applicability across engineering disciplines.