Thanks everyone for the interesting feedback and discussion. I definitely learned about some new tools I had not discovered yet, to add one more to the round, there is also CoCalc (https://cocalc.com/), which offers jupyter notebooks for different languages in the web, base version is free.
What I take for myself from this: * I will still follow The Carpentries philosophy of getting each participant set up with a working system locally on their laptop. * If there is decent internet access, I can rely on services like RstudioCloud for R or Microsoft Azure and CoCalc for python with Jupyter as a backup. These online offers can also serve as an alternative for participants whose computer is very slow or for participants who don’t have their own laptop and use a Lan computer in the workshop. For the three services mentioned above, one creates a free account which would be persistent and accessible from any computer (actually any internet device). Google Colab is another option for Jupyter python notebooks although their look is a bit different to the standard notebook. * I also want to include more pair-programming in my teaching, which can also take pressure of individual technical issues (not the main reason though) * If a workshop is in a place with limited internet access, a laptop or mini computer with RstudioServer or JupyterHub with extra router sounds like a good backup option. In addition, there is also the option of installing and run certain software from a usb drive, or an entire operating system (live linux distributions). I remember also the option of creating a local package repository, e.g. miniCran for R, to use for package installations. * Virtual machines are surely a nice option and I will likely play with them for my own interest, but I tend to leave those out for short workshops, they seem to introduce another level of complexity to explain to participants. summary list with links to tools mentioned: RstuioCloud https://rstudio.cloud Microsoft Azure notebooks https://notebooks.azure.com CoCalc https://cocalc.com Colab https://colab.research.google.com RstudioServer https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio-server/ JupyterHub https://jupyter.org/hub https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ miniCran https://andrie.github.io/miniCRAN/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/advanced-analytics/r/create-a-local-package-repository-using-minicran?view=sql-server-2017 Docker https://www.docker.com binder https://mybinder.org/ VirtualBox https://www.virtualbox.org R/Rstudio portable https://sourceforge.net/projects/rportable/ ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T963f4b806cda01a2-M6058a6723bcbbcd86ccd13b8 Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
