Just provide a room and the students
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-12-03 07:46:14 - Graham EllisI'm sitting, writing, in our training room and there are 9 laptops on the desks ready for the final day of Perl for Larger Projects. That's one laptop per trainee, some spares, a laptop off which we project course notes, and the system I'm writing from. Operating systems? A mixture of Unix, Linux and Windows so that the students can choose.
For both public and private courses, we provide a system for each trainee to use and a complete LAN too; at our offices, the LAN is connected to the Internet (with full 3Mbit access from all systems) but on site we run isolated - for security reasons, we don't want (or need) to connect inside your firewall. The system works well and is a delight to everyone - you "just provide the students" and we do the rest; you don't have to scramble about finding equipment or loading software, and we know what's on the systems and we can set up quickly and run an efficient course.
Over the past couple of years, though, some of our trainees have started bringing their own systems along, and they're welcomed on our network - we even have a page with full connection details on our web site. They can use their own data and programs for the course, they can grab copies of all our examples for the course off the course server, and at our offices they can check in with work via "the net" too.