Getting Started as an Instructor

This page explains how instructors create a course and build assignments in a course. It also explains how instructors invite students to the course.

Create a Course

Course in Lab.Computer allows you to create assignments and enroll students to attempt those assignments.

To create a course:

• Click the Create Course button on the top-right of the corner or the (+) at the center of the screen.
• Fill in the Course name, course Author, course Course description.
• If you want a public link for the course to share with your students, check the box for I want public link for joining the project.
• If you want to allow others to clone assignments in this course, check the box for Allow others to import course content.
• Click Create Course to finish.

Opening a Course

• You can click the Open Course button in the course tile to open it. This will list all assignments in the course.
  

Adding assignments to a course

When you create an assignment, you get a virtual server, where you can serve notebooks and install required dependencies. Every assignment server comes pre-installed with Ubuntu and root access privileges for instructors.

There are different ways of adding an assignment. You can add a new assignment or you can import an assignment from a library. You can also duplicate an assignment existing in your course.

• Adding a new assignment - To add a new assignment inside your course, click on the Create Assignment button. Fill the Assignment name and hit the Create Assignment button to finish.

• Importing from link - If someone shares a course public link with you (example link), you can clone assignments in that course. To clone, open the link in a browser tab where you will be shown all the released assignments in that course. Here you will get two options:

  • You can import any assignment by clicking on the Clone into existing course button.
  • Or, you can import all assignments shown at once using the Clone all assignments button.

  Select the course where you want to clone the courses to to finish. You can edit these assignments before releasing them to students.

• Duplicate an assignment - If you want to create a new assignment by editing on top an older one, you can duplicate the assignment. This will create a replica of the older assignment within the same course, which you can edit and then release to your students. To duplicate an assignment, click the button on the assignment and then select Duplicate Assignment option. Add a new name for the assignment, and click Create Assignment to finish.

Prepare assignment

An assignment can be made up of one or many notebooks with manually graded or autograded questions. All software needed by the notebook can be installed using the online terminal.

• Launch an Assignment - To launch an assignment, you need to start the server first. Click the button on the assignment. Wait for a few seconds for the server to start. You can then open the assignment notebook using the Edit button. You can use the breadcrumbs on the top-left corner of the assignement notebook to come back to the course page. To stop the assignment server, use the button.

• Install Software - To install any software or library inside an assignment, first, open the assignment using Edit button. Open a new tab in the notebook and select Terminal from all available kernels. This will start a bash shell into your virtual machine as the root user. Install any library or software using package managers like pip or apt.

• Creating an assignment To learn how to create notebook based assignments, Teaching with notebooks section.

• Release an assignment - To release an assignment, click on the Generate button in the top right corner of the notebook. After the assignment is generated, click on the Release button, also in the top right corner. Release will make the assignment available to the students and they can start working on it. After release, it is not possible to modify the student notebooks anymore.