Developing Online Computer Lab-Based Teaching Materials

Abstract

To get an online computer lab ready for teaching and hands-on practice, instructors should develop lab manuals and other online teaching materials. The lab teaching materials can be text, a combination of text and figures, or truly multimedia based materials including figures, sounds, animations, and video clips. By including multimedia in the instruction, the quality of the lab teaching materials can be greatly improved. The use of technology can make the tasks of developing multimedia teaching materials relatively easy. On the other hand, the use of multimedia teaching materials is limited to the type of hardware and software that are available on the server and client sides. Also, different instructions will have different requirements for multimedia materials. In this chapter, we will have a closer look at the issues related to the design of lab instructions and multimedia based teaching materials.