Towards a Flipped Optical Laboratory

This paper presents the main steps for creating an innovative educational Optical Laboratory, based on the flipped classroom educational model. This laboratory called FlipOL: Flipped Optical Laboratory. FlipOL intends to support hands-on training and skill enhancement on photonics by offering hands-on educational activities, broadening the audience and extending existing facilities expediting access to photonic components, measurement equipment of Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) and support services. Doing so, FlipOL aims to introduce, adapt and exploit the rich capabilities of current ICT distance learning toolkit towards negating the barriers associated with geographical location, localization and cost in outreach and learning activities. It will establish a single one-stop-shop Virtual Space for educational material, bringing the community of photonics in contact with well-established principles from the industrial and educational sector and shaping a portal to a rich on-line remote access portfolio. FlipOL specific objectives are: to establish a Photonics Community of Practice and the FlipOL Virtual Space in order to form a portal to support a broad range of training actions in Photonics and PICs, to extend and utilise existing facilities in order to facilitate access to photonic components and related equipment through creating (i) an online photonics design environment, (ii) a remote lab infrastructure, and (iii) an augmented reality on-site lab app, to deploy a Remote MakerLab that exposes the user to all integrated photonic technology processing cycles from designing, fabricating and measuring his/her own device, to organize a Lifelong Learning Program in Photonics based on Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs).