A Review of Virtual Laboratory and Justification for Adoption in Nigeria Tertiary Educational Institutions

Resumen

Physical laboratory (PL) is widely considered to be essential to learning and teaching science and engineering related courses. However, developing countries including Nigeria have struggled to provide quality training to students in the above fields due to inadequate laboratory facilities. The need to finding and adopting viable alternatives has become necessary. This paper proposed the adoption of virtual laboratory (VL) as a standard e-learning tool to complement the inadequacies of PL in Nigeria tertiary educational institutions. The paper reviewed several successful application of VL, comparison between VL and PL were made and suggestions on some justifications for adoption outlined. It concluded that, just like the digital libraries is complementing University physical libraries, VL could also be adopted to complement PL used in teaching and learning science and engineering courses whether on face-to-face or Open and Distance Learning (ODL) mode. The great potential that lies in VL offers the possibility of it being an alternative/ replacement of PL in most science and engineering disciplines in future, especially for those experiments learner decisions or actions are not based on tactile or olfactory sensory cues.