For distance-education students, the requirement for a laboratory course can present a significant hurdle to completing degree requirements. To better serve these nontraditional students, the authors developed a distance version of the laboratory course to provide a hands-on experience similar to that of on-campus students. In order to make the program succeed, they modified the existing nonmajors general-biology lab manual (Mickle et al. 2000) used on-campus so that the exercises would be comparable, yet reconfigured for a home situation. (Contains 7 figures.)