A Blended Approach for Teaching Laboratory Course: Internet Technology

Teaching laboratory courses is a challenging task as compared to teaching theory courses. From a teacher's perspective, it is a challenging task because he must be able to engage student actively for two hours. From a student perspective, it is challenging because students need to work themselves on machines or other equipment's to find out the solution which actually works for a particular problem. Four laboratory courses, students must be able to apply their past theory knowledge and skills for figuring out desired solution. So the lab course is beyond theory course.

But as a hand on experience is necessary for understanding of the associated theory concepts, it is inevitable. Also in conventional mode of teaching laboratory course where experiment list is predefined by the instructor, the student is passively involved in experimental work. This paper reveals how two pedagogic paradigms, namely Project Based Learning and Collaborative Learning are applied to the Internet Technology Laboratory course and shows how a student attains greater course outcomes than conventional methods used for teaching laboratory course. Project based learning gives better understanding of the concept because student learns by self-exploring and actually doing. On the other hand, in collaborative learning students work collectively in groups to deduce an answer to common problems.

The Internet, Technology Laboratory course is bas i c al ly des igned for unders t anding the terminologies related to internet protocols at application, routing and transport layers. It is challenging task to motivate students to design and develop all such applications. Hence, collaborative approach has been applied for enhancing the knowledge of the students related to this course by developing application layer protocols in a group. Also the commercial project design technique is used to solve real time problems of customers by designing websites. The student showed keen interest in understanding the customer needs and design the website for them. The analysis shows that there is an average increase of 15% to 20 % in course outcome attainment when this blended approach is applied.