Abstract—In the distance learning environment students are
often working from remote locations. All or most of their
interaction will be through the online course management
system. Since students cannot attend a physical lab classroom
there is a need for accessible labs to serve remote students and
improve their understanding of data warehouse (DW) and the
textbook materials. For the DW course specifically, a platform
that supports student exploration of several features such as
SQL, DW, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), as well as
design of the DW is needed. A data warehousing course that
meets many recommendations from industry and academia has
been successfully offered for several years at our school. The
DW course is offered solely in the online format using Oracle
products and datasets for labs. The class incorporates a data
warehouse design process that includes planning the star
schema as well as defining the metadata, physical design, and
application views. The paper describes the lab for the data
warehousing course, its design and implementation, the
exercises students will complete in both design and data analysis,
and the data warehousing tool itself.
Index Terms—Web-enabled lab, data warehousing, online
learning, distance education.
The authors are the George Herbert Walker School of Business and
Technology, Webster University, St. Louis, MO 63119 USA (e-mail:
wang@webster.edu, kourikjl@webster.edu).
Cite:Jiangping Wang and Janet L. Kourik, "Design and Implementation of Web-Enabled Labs for Data Warehousing," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 461-465, 2013.