This is the executive summary (or abstract) paragraph. This should be very very short and only highlight what this page is generally for.
+This page gives you a general information. For now, we would like you to contact us so that we can help you and also gain information on ways in which this solution is going to be used.
Page should be divided into three sections.
- All the things that are needed before virtual image creation is to be attempted. Additionally, it is necessary to list the practical limitations, such as being restricted to Linux when using the provided instances. Licensing issues should also be reminded of, so that a teacher won't start distributing a licensed operating system. All the steps (see below) in depth and with animated example images (use Screen2Gif). Finally, the page should be concluded with a list of resources, both internal and external, as well as link to the help page, which will be created specifically for the teachers.
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- Prerequisites and Limitations
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- Practical how-to instructios
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- Resources
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All images should be prefixed with the page name. For instance, this content is to be located in the "introduction.html", and thus all image resources (primarily) used by this content, should have their names prefixed with "introduction_".
-Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Feugiat scelerisque varius morbi enim. Semper auctor neque vitae tempus. Blandit massa enim nec dui. Faucibus vitae aliquet nec ullamcorper sit amet risus. Arcu non sodales neque sodales ut etiam. Amet mauris commodo quis imperdiet. Vulputate mi sit amet mauris commodo quis imperdiet. Laoreet non curabitur gravida arcu ac. Enim facilisis gravida neque convallis a cras. Pharetra et ultrices neque ornare aenean euismod elementum.
-Currently, there are two alternatives to choose from:
Unless you already are running any of the supported hypervisors, you need to install one. You have an option to either download generated image that has smaller footprint or standard Debian 10 installation that has been created using UTU answers file. If hypervisor installation has been successfully completed, this is as simple as double-clicking the downloaded .OVA -file. Hypervisor will take care of the rest. UTU Course Virtualization Team develops and publishes a number of virtual machines that are suitable as a foundation for many kinds of courses. You can simply download the one that best meets your requirements, import, run and install with the software needed in your course. Export procedure is a handful of clicks and then you can upload the image for your students to use. At this point, we would still like to hear from you and either recommend the best image or perhaps assist you in some requirements that could be useful for other courses as well. This part of the process is entirely in your hands. Technical consulation is available, but we cannot guarantee that we can solve all problems - but we will certainly try. VirtualBox: Right click on the virtual machine and select "export" VMPlayer: Some other thing... Creation of a virtual machine and installing the operating system into it is one of the most basic things that everyone does with their hypervisors. Nothing prevents you from doing exactly this, if you feel that what we can offer does not meet your requirements. We would like you to consider testing the virtual machine in all three major operating systems (MacOS, Linux and Windows) as well as with both hypervisors (VirtualBox and VMware) in all three OS'es. This is what we do with the ones we offer, just in case there are some unexpected issues. If you make your own virtual machine, you should still contact us as we can provide you with some start-up scripts that let students choose their locale and do some other useful personalization steps. That should save you some work and be worth dropping us a mail.
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- Install Hypervisor
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- Download basic VM image
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Import Downloaded VM Image
- Modify one of our VMs
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- Install and Configure Your Software
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Export Your VM Image
- Create your own
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Blah blah, yak yak yak...
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- PyQt is a port of the Qt library (C++). Qt is a very powerful GUI library. PyQt is not a single module, but a collection of modules.
-These modules include:
QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets, QtMultimedia, QtBluetooth, QtNetwork, QtPositioning, Enginio, QtWebSockets, QtWebKit, QtWebKitWidgets, QtXml, QtSvg, QtSql and QtTest.
So what’s in these modules?
-Qtcore contains the core non-GUI code.
QtGui has everything for window management like event handling and graphics.
QtWidgets has a many UI widgets like buttons, labels, textinput and other things you’d see in a desktop window.
QtMultimedia for multimedia content and camera.
QtBluetooth scan bluetooth devices and connect.
QtNetwork a cross-platform solution for network programming. Set up a socket server or client that works on all desktop systems. Supports both the TCP/IP stack and UDP.
QtPositioning determine a position by using a position (WiFi, Satellite)
QtWebSockets implementation of the websocket protocol.
QtWebKit web browser implementation. You can use this to render a webpage. This is based on WebKit2. WebKit is used in the Safari browser, by KDE and others.
QtWebKitWidgets Deprecated. WebKit1 version of web browser implementation
QtXml use XML files, reading/writing and so on.
QtSvg svg graphics (Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). A type of image format.
QtSql work with databases.
QtTest unit testing
You can easily make desktop software with PyQt. There are two ways to install PyQt: with an installer and from code.
-Compling PyQt from source can be a tedious process, recommend you to install using the installer or package manager. (an end-user can simply run a setup program to install your software)
-You can view the tutorial on PyQt installation.
- -After PyQt is installed, you can create all kind of desktop software. PyQt has many widgets including buttons, input fields, combobox, webview and tons of others.
-This is straightforward and you will learn how to do that in the next tutorials.
-Related Course:
PyQt Desktop Apps with Python
Please contact us at vm-support@utu.fi.
+There is some documentation available, which should be useful. More will hopefully become available later.
+This site is intended as the one-stop location for both students and teachers. In the upload page you can store your virtual machine image and set its availability (anyone, students, teachers, not-available). You can also give it a descriptive label ("name") and description, then give your students URL with search string that explicitly gives them your image - or just let the students search it themselves.
+What you should be careful about are any licensing issues. Virtual machines we offer are not subject to any lisencing and can be freely distributed, but you need to be aware of any licensing that the software you install might have. In many cases, campus licenses exist and you merely need to limit the availability of your image to authenticated students (set availability "students"). In more restrictive cases, please contact us and we will try to solve the licensing requirements either with existing features, or in cases where similar requirements are likely to appear again, we will create the necessary features for you.
This part should be a relief - if your virtual machine uses no licenses, you have no maintenance tasks at all.
+More likely, you will wish to update some software in your image - perhaps not even every year, but once in awhile. As far as virtual machine images are considered, that is not maintenance, but a creation of a new image. When that time comes, upload the updated image, set the availability and make the old image not available to anyone.
+Removal of old images will be available in the next feature update in Spring 2021. If you wish to remove images (instead of just hiding them), please contact us.
+If your virtual machine uses licensed software you should take care to remove its availability when the licensing agreement expires. If such images appear in this system, we will implement some tools for time limited availability or similar.
+
Design Document
diff --git a/html/help_teacher.html b/html/help_teacher.html
index 6756149..dea5833 100644
--- a/html/help_teacher.html
+++ b/html/help_teacher.html
@@ -48,9 +48,7 @@
help stuff
-help stuff
-Please refer to documentation page.
+Please try to be as descriptive as possible to make helping you more efficent. In more challenging issues, be prepared to meet us personally to work out a satisfactory solution.
Support email address: vm-support@utu.fi
Please allow up to 2-3 days for replies. Personnel helping you are available only 2 days per week.
diff --git a/html/img/create_export_vm.gif b/html/img/create_export_vm.gif deleted file mode 100644 index 837443d..0000000 Binary files a/html/img/create_export_vm.gif and /dev/null differ diff --git a/html/img/site-logo.png b/html/img/site-logo.png deleted file mode 100644 index e38a506..0000000 Binary files a/html/img/site-logo.png and /dev/null differ diff --git a/html/introduction.html b/html/introduction.html index 3eecc8f..6f7223d 100644 --- a/html/introduction.html +++ b/html/introduction.html @@ -49,9 +49,9 @@ @@ -72,6 +72,7 @@What is "course virtualization" and why should I care?
@@ -84,42 +85,40 @@Despite computer programming courses today often having hundreds of participants, - it is important that the students complete practical programming exercises and have - a possibility to participate in hands-on programming sessions, where they can get help from - their peers and teaching assistants. However, heterogeneous devices used by students pose a - great challenge. When installing and using development tools, both platform specific issues - and the limitations of students’ personal skill cause issues and lots of extra work for teachers. - To address these challenges, we built a virtualized environment that provides the - same homogeneous environment for all the students, reducing the time used for configuration - and assisting students and allowing time to be used teaching the actual contents of the course.
- -
- A hypervisor is a program that emulates a computer.
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- What is a hypervisor?
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Installation of a hypervisor is considerably simpler than installing and configuring - large sets of development tools. Instead of every student installing and configuring - all of the software needed on a course, possibly needing lecturer or peer assistance, - students can install a hypervisor and run a virtual machine that already has the software pre-installed. This greatly reduces the time and - resources used for course and assignment preparations and enables the time to be used for actual course activities instead. The approach also has several other positive effects:
+Especially bachelor's level courses can have well over hundred participants, sometimes over two hundred. Trying to help everyone sort out their personal computers to install the required software ... can be a pain, to put it mildly. This not only consumes great amount of instructors time, but can also make the first week modest in terms of reached learning goals while time is used to sort out problems and let everyone stay with the course.
+This is a terrible waste of student's and teacher's time, and simply shouldn't be. Alternative approaches include things such as faculty provided computer classrooms, which are much too small and would require running the same sessions multiple times, or trying to cope with provided browser based virtualization - where all the work and configuration are discarded each time the student logs out. Quite simply, these are not viable solutions.
+Fortunately virtualization can provide a solution. Instead of struggling with each set of software and tools required in each course, students should only have to deal with one installation - the hypervisor (which runs virtual machines). And because that one installation is so important to multiple courses (which use course virtualization), it can justifiably be allocated some resources, unlike with each specific software required by a course.
+With an initial investment of creating the virtual learning environment (installing the software yourself), you can export the result, upload it here and let students download and use the exact same thing you have. Such time investment can be used for several years, or until you see a need to update your virtual environment.
+Our virtualization solution saves your time, your students time and everyones nerves.
+Installation of a hypervisor is considerably simpler than installing and configuring large and/or complex development tools. At least, the issues involved are limited to a fairly well known set. Instead of every student installing and configuring all of the software needed on a course, often needing at least some lecturer or peer assistance, after getting their hypervisor running, students can avoid all course related software installation simply by downloading and running a virtual machine with all the required software pre-installed. This can completely eliminate all the work previously spent in getting everyone's tools ready. Time that can be used for actual course activities instead. The approach also has several other positive effects:
+Virtual machine images also offer many potential other enhancements for teachers who are willing to spend some additional time. For example, it is relatively simple to hide some programs and let them simply appear in the user interface at given date and time (after related topics are handled in lectures), keeping the environment focused on tools that the student is expected to use at any given time over the course. For more complex courses, reactions and stimulus could be programmed or scripted into the virtual machine to challenge students to deal with unexpected conditions - the kind that the teacher has control over.
+While the benefits are numerous and significant, virtual machines also have certain limitations. Following items should be noted:
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