Remote Computer Laboratories: Opportunities for South African Universities

Abstract

Computer laboratories are some of the limited resources that South African universities are battling to improve students' access to. Many, if not all, of these universities use a hands-on approach for computer laboratory access. A number of research studies in the past two decades have been written on the problems presented by the hands-on approach and in turn two alternative approaches have been suggested to address these problems. The problems presented by the hands-on approach have caused a negative impact on both students' performance in their computer programming subjects and the students' throughput rate. The two alternative solutions which have been proposed by many researchers in this field are virtual laboratories and remote laboratories. Due to many challenges which prohibit students' access to computer laboratories as well as the various problems presented by the current hands-on approach to South African universities, this paper has investigated the opportunities presented by the abovementioned alternative solutions. The investigation has provided answers to this study's research questions and these answers point to the use of remote computer laboratories as an ideal choice to resolve many of the current computer laboratory challenges experienced by South African universities.