Azure Lab Services is a cloud based classroom enabling students and instructors to access virtual machines (VM's) for lab assignments within iSchool courses. If you are an instructor for an iSchool (IST) course and are interested in having a VM provisioned for your students, please contact iSchool's Technology Services team by emailing ischoolit@ot.syr.edu.
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After Technology Services has created the lab environment, you can log into Azure Lab services by navigating to labs.azure.com and providing your Syracuse University email address and password.
Add Students to the Lab
- By default IT will add all students from your class roster. You can add/remove as needed.
Select Users on the left menu. By default, the Restrict access option is enabled. When this setting is on, a user can't register with the lab even if the user has the registration link unless the user is in the list of users. Only users in the list can register with the lab by using the registration link you send. In this procedure, you add users to the list. Alternatively, you can turn off Restrict access, which allows users to register with the lab as long as they have the registration link.
Select Add users on the toolbar, and then select Add by email address.
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- After you connect to your lab template, configure this template machine for your course.
- Any changes you make within this machine can be 'published' to the whole class --creating a base template image for your course.
- After you have made your changes, stop your running template by selecting the 'stop template' button in the toolbar.
Publish Lab Template
When your template has been configured and stopped, you can then publish the updated template to your class. This will delete all existing student machines and deploy a new set of machines based on the latest, published, template. The publish button is on the tool bar. Publishing a template, in a course of 30 students, takes roughly 1 hour.
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Quota for a user specifies the number of lab hours available to the user outside of the scheduled class time.
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Important Information
- As mentioned above, please manage the quota hours for your students and lab according to the needs and staying within budget.
- Template VMs incur cost when running, so ensure that the template VM is shutdown when you don’t need it to be running.
- Automatic shutdown & disconnect options should alway be checked and set at 15 minutes.
- Please reach out to ischoolit@ot.syr.edu with any issues or questions regarding Azure Lab Services.
- Exporting a modified Lab Template. This request can be triggered by a sudden change in the lab workflow. The change resulted in a new lab deployment to all sections of a course.
Scheduling an Asynchronous Lab Session. This request can be triggered by the need to speed up the boot up process if the Instructor have a planned lab session during a class hours.
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