Online platform for interactive tutorials: Provisioning virtual environments

Abstract

Traditionally, whenever students learn a new technology, they need to either setup their working environments on their own machines or go to physical laboratories provided by the teaching institutions. In the first case, the setup of the needed tools is cumbersome or even impossible on all personal computers; in the second case, laboratories for certain topics are not feasible due to the threat to the stability and security of the system. Recently, virtualization has been extensively used to provide dedicated environments with full control over the system and to create interactive tutorials that engage the student with the learning resources through a web browser. However, most of the tools that are publicly available are built for specific purposes and are not extensible. There are many situations where organizations need customized solutions that give them full control over the system to offer better support as well as progress tracking and automated assessment. This thesis describes the implementation of OnPIT, an online plat-form for interactive tutorials. Different from the existing work, OnPIT is based on software containers. Moreover, it provides access to learning environments through a web browser, side by side with the tasks to be completed during a tutorial. Furthermore, OnPIT allows the creation of new tutorials that are pre-configured with the necessary tools, it can be scaled based on the demand and the available resources, and it also supports automated assessment. The thesis overviews the overall design and implementation of OnPIT. Afterwards, it details the provisioning of dedicated environments based on software containers, including the security issues and technology limitations as well as possible solutions to overcome them.