Labtainers for educators

Educators

The Labtainers Instructor Guide includes information on deploying Labtainers for use in your courses, and on using the automated assessment features to aid your review of student progress.  Use of Labtainers is demonstrated in a series of tutorial videos.  An overview of Labtainers was presented as a Center for Academic Excellence Tech Talk (video) (slides).

Stay up to date

If you'd like to be notified of updates to the Labtainer framework, please send an email to labtainers-request [at] freelists.org with 'subscribe' in the Subject field OR by visiting our mail list page at http://www.freelists.org/list/labtainers.  Also see the What's new page.

Contribute

The Labtainers framework lets you create new labs and publish them so that your students and/or other institutions can benefit from your contributions.  Lab creation and publishing are described in the Lab Designer User Guide, and a tutorial on creating new labs was included in the SIGCSE2021 Labtainers Workshop guide. See the IModules page for currently available labs from other authors.

Custom Lab Manuals

Instructors can easily publish custom versions of Labtainers lab manuals for use by their students.  Simply follow these steps:

  • Create your version of the manual in the pdf format (if the manual source is docx, export it as pdf).
  • Put that manual in a file with the original name, in a directory whose name is the lab, e.g., telnet-lab/telnet-lab.pdf
  • Create a tar file of the manual including the lab name in the path.
  • Publish that tar file onto a web server, i.e., something that responds to http get commands.
  • Instruct your students to provide that URL to the imodule command in their Labtainers VM.

If you wish to publish multiple custom lab manuals, put them all in the same tar file.

CyberCIEGE

You may also be interested in using CyberCIEGE in your classes.  This is a teaching tool we have developed that uses a video game format.  CyberCIEGE is included as a Labtainer, e.g., to run the game without access to a Windows OS.