Instructors should strongly consider using Docker/VM installations for training sessions, when 1. There's no room in the schedule for dealing with installation headaches (very large classes, abbreviated sessions) Alternately, audiences which aren't 100% convinced what you're teaching them is going to help them. Being able to jump right in without doing environment setup may be useful in that context. 2. The instructors have access to a suitably sized cloud infrastructure (via local University resources, sponsored Rackspace hosting, etc...) 3. Network access is guaranteed. 4. The instructors are familiar with the Docker/VM infrastructure they are teaching 5. The learners are already familiar with Linux, explicitly want to learn it, or it's an authentic task worthy of a lesson in its own right.
That's a tricky one. Fiona Tweedie is using DIT4C to teach NLTK for analysis of humanities texts. The audience isn't exactly filled with people familiar with Linux bash prompts. This isn't necessarily a problem though, because most of the coursework can be done from inside iPython Notebook. To analyse your own texts you need to upload the files, but that just requires a file upload GUI (which we have). If you want to upload a zip file and extract, then you need to break out a shell terminal, but with instructor help that may not be a big issue. That said though, we had our fair share of stumbles initially because we didn't keep a proper eye on #4, and so we ended up doing things from the bash prompt that we could have pre-built into the image. That eventually coincided with a pretty major bug with the shell terminal in our image, which held up a session for over an hour. Using platforms like these is a trade-off IMHO - you get more teaching time, but the prep time can be significant, and there's certainly a learning curve. I think the jury is still out on #5. More data is needed. Tim -- Tim Dettrick Senior Software Engineer The University of Queensland ITEE e-Research Group
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