Supporting Cs Education Via Virtualization And Packages

Higher education is facing a paradigm shift in the ownership and use of computer hardware. The school computer lab is no longer the primary place of student computer use. Instead, students increasingly expect to use their own hardware to complete their school assignments. This creates a challenge for computer science educators: we must now support a wide range of heterogeneous hardware without the benefits of tight control over its use. To address this "Bring-Your-Own-Device" (BYOD) challenge, we leverage virtualization and software packaging systems to gracefully deploy and support a standardized development environment for all core CS courses across a range of both school-owned and student-owned computing devices. We have deployed and evaluated our system for the previous two years at scale and continue to actively use and develop it. It has effectively helped us support multiple classes comprising hundreds of students with very limited IT staffing. We describe the design and management of our system, present our experience using our system, and discuss the lessons we've learned. We also provide data reflecting current student user experience with our system. Our system has proven very effective in addressing the student BYOD challenge in a manageable, cost-efficient, and easy-to-use manner.