A Virtual Laboratory for Electronic Commerce

Alfred C. Weaver, Computer Science

2002 TTI Fellow

Project website: (under construction)

With sponsorship from the National Science Foundation, we have created a new course, CS453 Electronic Commerce Technologies that covers both the business and technical aspects of operating an e-business. The course includes a three-hour weekly laboratory session that teaches programming topics such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, SQL, and ASP. The lab has well-developed content, but is expensive to operate (fifty computers, four teaching assistants, and a one-third time staff person for 48 students). The virtual laboratory concept retains the educational material, but moves all computation and development to the student's own computing resources (we still provide a web server and group licenses to use SQL and ASP). In this new version of the course, students will download public software from the web (e.g., Perl from ActiveState.com), and will download all virtual lab assignments, explanatory materials, and exercise answers from our website at http://iis.cs.virginia.edu/webweavers/ec%20labs. Students in the virtual lab will operate in a self-paced environment that permits anywhere, anytime access to an ever-growing body of instructional material.

The advantages of this approach include:

• students need not appear at a fixed time and place
• virtual labs are not time limited
• the topical coverage is the same as the physical lab
• the number of students in the course is not limited to the capacity of the lab (48)
• the department will save money by reducing staff and TA support

• students are neither forced nor motivated by weekly meeting schedules
• the reduced staff and TA support may diminish the course's impact
• students may not be able to download and configure software without technical support.

One of our first challenges will be to determine whether the increased freedom and flexibility of the virtual lab is a true asset to learning, and whether the reduced staff support increases student frustration with the mechanics of software maintenance. Given current budget realities, our department expects that hands-on programming laboratories will become increasingly rare. We are unsure of the resulting impact on educational quality. Our virtual lab in CS453 will allow us to assess that issue, at least with third- and fourth-year students.