A Portable Virtual LAB for Informatics Education using open Source Software

The need for students to have hands-on experience is very important in many disciplines to match the requirements of today’s dynamic job market. Informatics, which is the science of information engineering, has been recently integrated into many academic programs. Teaching students the main skills in modern software and web development is essential for them to be successful informatics professionals. For any informatics program, students engage in working on projects as essential parts for some courses in their academic programs. This paper presents the development and evaluation of MiLAB (My Mobile Informatics Lab), a portable virtual lab environment for the teaching and learning of modern web development skills. MiLAB has been integrated into an undergraduate health informatics academic program to improve the teaching and learning of essential web development skills, such as databases management and customization of modern content management systems. The evaluation of MiLAB indicated that it served as an interactive personal environment for students to implement, collaborate, and present their web development projects. Strengths, weaknesses and possible improvements are also discussed. Keywords—Virtual labs; open source software; e-learning