Energy : Advanced undergrad labs - survey. Alternatif Energy

To my readers at universities:  I am interested in learning more about how other institutions do junior/senior level physics undergrad lab courses.  My impression is that there are roughly three approaches:

• Self-guided or not to various degrees, students pick some set of predefined experiments that are presumably meant to teach pieces of physics while exposing the students to key components of modern research (more serious data acquisition; statistics+error analysis; sophisticated research instrumentation beyond what they would see in a first-year undergrad lab, such as lock-in amplifiers, high speed counters and vetoing, lasers, vacuum systems).  Sometimes students would work with an instructor to commission a new experiment rather than do one of the existing set.  This approach is what I saw as an undergrad - I remember running into a classmate late at night who had been doing some classic experiment confirming the \(1/r^{2}\) form of the Coulomb force law, and I remember three friends working as a team to commission a dye laser as part of such a project.
• More topically narrow but intense/sophisticated labs.  For example, when I was a grad student I was a TA for a dedicated low temperature physics lab, where students chose from a list of experiments, designed some apparatus (!), had the parts machined by the shop (!!), and then actually assembled and ran their experiments over the course of a quarter.  It gave students a real sense of serious experimental research in its various phases, but only aimed to expose them to a comparatively narrow slice of modern physics.  I've heard of similar lab courses based on optics or atomic physics projects, and entire courses about electronics.
• Some hybrid, where students do a combination of pre-fab experiments and then do a one-semester experimental project actually in an active research group, as part of their lab training and credit.

Questions for readers:  Am I leaving out some approach that you've experienced or run across?  If you're a faculty member in a university physics department, what does your department want/hope the undergraduates get out of these lab experiences?  Are there approaches to more advanced formal lab training that you particularly like and find successful (not counting having individual undergrads work in research groups, which we always encourage anyway)?  Students, were there particular labs or approaches that you really found valuable?