My school has something very similar to this. It's a HHMI funded project, where undergrads have novel research projects within the context of a "genetics lab" course. It sounds very similar to what you're describing. Students maintain laboratory records and write reports. The data is compiled into a database. The stocks generated are made freely available to other investigators and a paper describing the different stages of the project is published with all students who complete the courses as authors.
I've spoken to admissions officers who are familiar with our course, and they said it does count as "research experience". In fact, a student can even consider the final research paper to be "a publication", since it is indeed published in a journal. Soo... as far as I know, classes like these ARE considered research... (Too bad I wasn't able to take one)