Individualized laboratory using Moodle

Practical laboratories are an integral part of an engineering education. The development of a challenging lab for a course requires a significant effort on the part of faculty and support staff. Thus labs, once developed, tend to have a relatively long lifetime. A problem with traditional labs is that student´s lab results can be passed on to ¿next years¿ students. This reduces the effectiveness of the lab, since students are unlikely to put the same effort into the lab when working from a previous lab book. This paper describes a method to address this problem. This method makes use of a Moodle-based implementation to individualize the lab. The lab is structured to make use of the features in Moodle to automatically vary key parameters in the lab tasks. Thus, each lab group effectively has a different set of lab tasks. An added advantage of this approach is that the individualized lab task results are automatically marked. This approach has been used in a course that introduces students to a DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chip and the software used to build and debug DSP programs. Preliminary feedback indicates that the students like this Moodle-based approach.