Lab Instructions for Students

Lab manuals come in two formats.

Some schools rely on published manuals, usually glossy, heavy books with photographs and illustrations, which are not as expensive as textbooks, but are not cheap either. Oftentimes, instructors use only a small fraction of the experiments either for lack of time or lack of equipment. Most four-year colleges and community colleges provide their own manuals at cost to the students. The manuals are not as visually appealing, but they are tailored to the curriculum and the equipment at hand and they are very, very cheap.

The newest trend is to load the manual online. Students download and print instructions as they go. The major advantage, of course, is that the manual can be constantly updated, improved, and modified at no cost. Links to videos and animations are embedded in the text. The manual for my class is online and I am currently fending off attempts to adopt a publisher's manual.
The document below is an example of lab instruction. The illustrations I use are in the public domain at the Public Health Library, a service of the CDC.