Distance education as a stand-alone approach has grown tremendously in the past 10 years. The other form of distance education, often called hybrid, supplements traditional classroom instruction with online resources. The instructors deliver classroom lectures, but homework, assignments, and supplemental material may be retrieved online. Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) is a junior-level course offered for a number of years to students predominately in the Industrial Technology and Computer Information Technology fields of study at Purdue University. Adoption of this course as part of the bachelor of science degree in Industrial Technology in 2002 by a number of Purdue University College of Technology sites across the state necessitated an evaluation of how to proceed with a laboratory-intensive course, to those distance sites that did not have comprehensive laboratory facilities. In this article, the authors discuss their experiences in the fall 2005 AIDC class of 69 on-campus students and 6 distance education students, acknowledging the limited data set in the distance education cohort. The lab modules offered a particular challenge. Early studies found that the performance of both groups of students was equivalent when activities could be presented equally. When the lab exercises could not be effectively transferred to a distance format, performance of the two groups differed significantly. In the study reported, however, where performance for the two groups was the same for some activities and different for others, the students' prior knowledge and competence with computers seem to have contributed to the results. (Contains 2 tables, 2 figures and 8 endnotes.)