Ever since I joined the OU, I’ve believed in trying to deliver distance education courses in an agile and responsive way, which is to say: making stuff up for students whilst the course is in presentation.
This is generally not done (by course/module teams at least) because the aim of most course/module teams is to prepare the course so thoroughly that it can “just” be presented to students.
Whatever.
I personally think we should try to improve the student experience of the course as it presents if we can by being responsive and reactive to student questions and issues.
So… TM351, the data management course that uses a VM, has started again, and issues / questions are already starting to hit the forums.
One of the questions – which I’d half noted but never really thought through in previous presentations (my not iterating/improving the course experience in, or between, previous presentations) – related to sharing Jupyter notebooks across different machines using Google Drive (equally, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive).
The VirtualBox VM we use is fired up using the vagrant provisioner. A Vagrantfile defines various configuration settings – which ports are exposed by the VM, for example. By default, the contents of the folder in which vagrant is started up in are shared into the VM. At the same time, vagrant creates a hidden .vagrant folder that contains state relating to the instance of that VM.
The set up on a single machine is something like this:
If a student wants to work across several machines, they need to share their working course files (Jupyter notebooks, and so on) but not the VM machine state. Which is to say, they need a set up more like the following:
For students working across several machines, it thus makes sense to have all project files in one folder and a separate .vagrant settings folder on each separate machine.
Checking the vagrant docs, it seems as if this is quite manageable using the synced folder configuration settings.
The default copies the current project folder (containing the vagrantfile and from which vagrant is rum), which I’m guessing is a setting something like:
config.vm.synced_folder "./", "/vagrant"
By explicitly setting this parameter, we can decide how we want the mapping to occur. For example:
config.vm.synced_folder "/PATH/ON/HOST", "/vagrant"
allows you to to specify the folder you want to share into the VM. Note that the /PATH/ON/HOST folder needs to be created before trying to share it.
To put the new shared directory into effect, reload and reprovision the VM. For example:
vagrant reload --provision
Student notebooks located in the notebooks folder of that shared directory should now be available in the VM. Furthermore, if the shared folder is itself in a webshared folder (for example, a synced Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive folder) it should be available wherever that folder is synched to.
For example, on a Mac (where ~ is an alias to my home directory), I can create a directory in my dropbox folder ~/Dropbox/TM351VMshare and then map this into the VM using by adding the following line to the Vagrantfile:
config.vm.synced_folder "~/Dropbox/TM351VMshare", "/vagrant"
Note the possibility of slight confusion – the shared folder will not now be the folder from which vagrant is run (unless the folder are running from is /PATH/ON/HOST ).
Furthermore, the only thing that needs to be in the folder from which vagrant is run is the Vagrantfile and the hidden .vagrant folder that vagrant creates.
Fingers crossed this recipe works…;-)
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