From cluster to cloud to appliance

Abstract

We propose a client-side virtual machine (VM) as an alternative to on-campus clusters and off-campus clouds as a development environment for students in introductory courses.

HarvardX and MITx: Two Years of Open Online Courses Fall 2012-Summer 2014

“…Instant-feedback assessment scoring, video annotation tools, online office hours, and high-quality videos have served both online and residential students (e.g., Malan, 2013;Rayyan & Belcher, 2014). Many examples of these feedback loops were reviewed in the HarvardX and MITx Year 1 reports (e.g., Reich et al, 2014;Seaton et al, 2014).…”

“…Professor David Malan designed the "CS50 Appliance," a virtual environment for students to develop code and receive feedback (Malan, 2013). Professor Malan has used data from the appliance to understand and improve how students code and use feedback.…”

MC-Live

“…To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request systems such as SDF [10] and WSUnix [12], "live" Linux systems on CD or DVD-ROMs [1,2,4,5], virtualization [6,9,11] 1 , and "cloud-based" environments accessed via web browser [7,8,14] Each of these approaches has its benefits and drawbacks [3].…”