Design and development of online lab exercises

Abstract

Internet is one of the best inventions in the 20th century. In today’s modern technological age, it has become a norm for people to learn new knowledge just by doing a search on the Internet. Educational institutes all over the world have made use of the Internet to conduct what is known as e-learning, to educate their students over the Internet, minimising the needs to conduct lessons in physical locations. Existing laboratory classes can only be held in physical locations due to the fact that laboratory classes require hands-on interact between the student and the equipment. The online laboratory was implemented by a group of final year students last year. The author and 5 other students were tasked to improve and add extra functionalities to the existing online laboratory. The tasks assigned to the 6 of them includes designing additional online laboratory exercises, improving the scheduling system and video streaming system and bringing the online laboratory out of the isolated school network, allowing people from all over the world to access the online laboratory. This report focuses on the designing additional online laboratory exercises, together with the analysis of the survey results gathered from students after they tried the online laboratory exercise. The survey result has demonstrated that the online laboratory exercise designed was found to have good acceptance in term of user experience.