The adoption of virtual laboratories has seen significant growth, particularly within tertiary education, driven by the increasing need for flexible, accessible, and scalable learning environments. A significant development in this area is the integration of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, leading to the emergence of VR Labs, which offer immersive, interactive simulations that enhance experiential learning. Recognizing the potential of these VR Labs to transform education, several Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have begun incorporating them as part of the course content, providing students with hands-on experience that transcends geographical and physical limitations. Some of these VR Labs use avatar recordings to demonstrate lab procedures, but research on their design for effective learning and live learner monitoring remains limited. In this work, we examined how experiment complexity, equipment placement, and instructor avatar positioning affect learning in a VR Lab. By analyzing an existing avatar recording-based VR Lab, we designed an improved VR Lab by using the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test for COVID-19 in biomedical engineering as an example experiment. We conducted a user study with 10 users to evaluate the learning experience and gathered feedback on live monitoring and educational use of VR Labs from a learner's perspective. The findings are summarized as novel design guidelines for creating enhanced avatar recording-based VR Labs, focusing on the experiment steps, the equipment placement, the instructor avatar placement, a monitoring interface, and recommendations on utilizing VR Labs as a pedagogical tool in standalone experiences and a course component scenario.

A Virtual Reality Laboratory (VR Lab) experiment refers to an experiment session that is being conducted in the virtual environment through Virtual Reality (VR) and aims to deliver procedural knowledge to students similar to that in a physical lab environment. While VR Lab is becoming more popular among education institutes as a learning tool for students, existing designs are mostly considered from a student's perspective. Instructors could only receive limited information on how the students are performing and could not provide useful feedback to aid the students' learning and evaluate their performance. This motivated us to create VisTA-LIVE: a Visualization Tool for Assessment of Laboratories In Virtual Environments. In this article, we present in detail the design thinking approach that was applied to create VisTA-LIVE. The tool is deployed in an Extended Reality (XR) environment, and we report the evaluation results with domain experts and discuss issues related to monitoring and assessing a live VR lab session which lay potential directions for future work. We also describe how the resulting design of the tool could be used as a reference for other education developers who wish to develop similar applications.