Work in progress: Onground versus distance rapid prototyping practices

It is always a challenge for educators to provide students with an adequate laboratory experience at a time and place convenient for them. This applies to both conventional hands-on courses as well as to laboratory enhanced distance courses. Traditional laboratory classes are scheduled only for a specified time period, when students attend a laboratory class located within their home institution. Considering the ability level of students, the allocated time period is usually not enough for all students to complete their assigned tasks satisfactorily and also gain sufficient experience through the practice. To address these issues, there are a number of projects that have been made to provide experimentation facilities over the Internet. Tennessee Tech University was able to establish a rapid prototyping laboratory as part of a NSF CCLI grant in 2003. Students have used the lab in their on ground practices until 2007. Starting 2007 this laboratory has been converted to a remotely accessible format with another CCLI grant. Now, various traditional and distance course students have been using the laboratory for little over one year. Instructional delivery and laboratory materials have been developed and dissemination has been made through the Tennessee Board of Regents institutions, and some other schools in Georgia and Nevada. Student learning assessments have been collected and tabulated with a survey instrument. Best practices and corrective actions have been executed based on the inputs received from the survey results. This WIP paper reports the current results received from the on ground and distance rapid prototyping laboratory practices.