The critical shortage of photonics-educated graduates, the prohibitive cost of lab-oratory experiments and the limitations of simulators that lack the key aspects essentialto optical communications, creates significant challenges to those charged with teach-ing lasers and optical communications to engineers. To solve this problem, we havedeveloped a novel photonics simulation experiment module, which provides studentswith an understanding and visualization of how lasers can be modulated to encodedata signals onto optical carriers for optical fibre communications. This paper describesthe innovative photonics module, and the student response, which has resulted insuccessful learning outcomes.The pedagogy of optical communications for telecommunications engineering coursespresents significant challenges. A critical aspect involves the essential student under-standing of how lasers can be modulated to encode data signals onto optical carriersfor transmission in a fibre optic system. The dynamic modulation characteristics oflasers underpin the fundamental information-carrying capacities of optical systems.Unfortunately, these dynamic properties, such as relaxation oscillations, turn-on jitter,laser chirp and noise are complex phenomena, resulting in difficulties for students toconceptualise the behaviour. Approaches to address this problem of student visualisation in communication systems,by conducting laboratory experiments are usually not possible because of the prohibitivecost of lasers, modulators, photodetectors, spectrum analysers and error rate sets.Moreover, important aspects such as laser chirp, which is crucial in fibre transmissionsystems, are extremely difficult to measure experimentally. Approaches to address thisproblem by means of computer simulations have been limited because adequate lasermodels have not been available to date for teaching of optical communications. Basiclaser simulators, as used in physics courses, are unsuitable because they lack the keyaspects essential to optical communications, including modulation dynamics, digitaldata input signals, laser chirping, noise, and bit error rate characteristics.