Towards Virtualizing Structural Engineering Education

The digitalization of teaching has been accelerated recently, in particular due to the challenges posed by the Corona crisis. While courses without physical activity can be usually converted to an online format using learning platforms, laboratory courses, due to their interactive nature, are notably harder to digitalize. This work is concerned with digitalizing a specific practical university-level course in the field of Civil Engineering, using real-time Multimedia Technology. This course requires to transfer knowledge with both a temporal and spatial aspect in order to complete an experiment. After considering the available options for digitalization, a prototype for an interactive virtual learning environment is constructed, featuring two different user interfaces. The results of a subsequent evaluationwith students suggest that the type of selectionmechanism can influence their information intake, depending on the nature of the skills to be transferred.