Online programming class with a lab requirement

[pixaloop]

Does anyone have any experience taking an online programming class with a lab requirement? I'm wondering how one can fulfill this requirement while taking a course online. My online guess is that Blackboard somehow supports or Etudes.

Anyone care to shed some light?

TIA

[SandraNC]

Our IT classes at the community college have labs. In my experience, "lab" means "programming homework." Whenever I take an in-person class, the lab is free time in class where the instructor is available to help people one-on-one with questions. For online classes, the lab is simply "do your homework."

Unlike science classes, there is no separate lab credit for IT. All of my IT classes have been 3 credits.

[SRT12]

When I took Intro to Programming (Java) it was worth 4 credits. It was 2 hours twice a week.

[scorched]

There is nothing special about online programming classes with labs.

You have assignments to write a program in the language you are learning. The "source code" is typically submitted as the homework assignment, sometimes the compiled code is required to prove you can make it.

But your computer is the lab.

Now depending on the language your learning, that will determine what you need to install on your own computer. If your learning c or c++ and others like it, then you need what is called a compiler that will take your code and make it into something like a .exe file. You can make code in something as easy as notepad or wordpad in windows, or get a free but fancy IDE-integrated development environment like Eclipse.
The school or class will tell you what you need. And unless you take a very specialized course most tools are free, the rest are radically discounted for students.

Microsoft studio express is free from microsoft
xcode from apple is $4.99 ( makes apple, and iphone/ipad applications)
GCC - gnu compiler collection is free (works on a unix, linux, apple, window and many more) works for the languages (c, c++, objective-c, fortran, Ada, and go)
Java - download the free Java Development Kit
Scripted languages tend to be free anyway(javascript, perl, php, python, tcl/tk) Just need to download the language interface.

Hope this helps.