Gettting 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.

Creating an Account

• If you are new to the Lab.computer, sign up for an account here: Lab Computer Registration.
• After submitting the form, you will get a verification message sent to your email in minutes.
• After clicking the confirmation link in the message, you will be able to login to Lab Computer Login.

Create a Course

Course in lab is a set of assignments and a number of students enrolled in the course.

Click the Create Course button on the top-right of the corner or the (+) at the center of the screen.

A new course tile should get created.

Add or duplicate an assignment on a lightweight OS

An assignment in lab is a light-weight Ubuntu OS where you can install anything and create a notebook assignment.

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

. Add an assignment and build it on a lightweight linux OS. Instructors enjoy administrative access(root) to add any language compiler/interpreter, libraries, packages, datasets, services(like databases) as required by the assignment. These full OS can be copied to thousands of students easily with little resources taken.
OR
. Duplicate an assignment to create a new assignments from an assignment that you had created previously. It allows you to track it as a new assignment and also add extra questions and required software.

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 intalled using an online terminal

• Launch a course

• Connect to a course and install software. You get root access and fast network to install software. The base OS has some software installed but you can install and configure any software in the ubuntu server. This may include apt packages, language libraries(pip, maven etc), services(databases, pub/sub systems), datasets etc.

• Create notebook based assignments for students. The full OS along with the student version of the notebooks will be shared with the students.

  • There are two types of questions: manually graded or auto-graded.
  • You can choose among many preloaded languages or install more
  • You can generate the student version many times and examine them to make sure student version is properly setup.

  You can read more about how to create assignments in different languages using notebooks in the section teaching with notebooks

Release an assignment.

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.