In 2006, the UCM School of Engineering quickly created its Collaboratory, an instructional computing lab of diskless Linux workstations. The Collaboratory has grown to several rooms, including some dual-boot labs. It has proven to be a low-cost, low-maintenance system which provides users with complete ("root") access to the system.
In 2020, as the decision was made to teach classes remotely, the lab environment also moved online. Using a Web browser, students boot and interact with Web instances as they are needed. This has been an easy way for students to access the lab environment and has required negligible specialized setup and maintenance. It is much more economical to run than other solutions and scales well.
This session will primarily describe the technical implementation of this system.