wiki:GENIEducation/Resources

Version 29 (modified by nriga@bbn.com, 10 years ago) (diff)

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Planning a Class or an Event on GENI

If you would like to use GENI in your classroom, or do a one-time tutorial there are a few things that you need to do. Based on our experience we came up with the following timeline of when things should happen in order for your class/event to go smoothly. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions.

Click on each part of the timeline to see more details.

Click here to print the checklist Two Weeks Checklist One Week Before Checklist Before the exercise checklist Image Map

Early, at least two weeks in advance

Depending on your class/event you want to start the process as early as possible especially if this would be your first use of GENI.

  1. [Optional] Notify us that you will be using GENI.
    This will let us help you along the process. We strongly recommend this, if this is your first time using GENI
  2. Access to GENI
    • If you are planning to use the GENI Portal in your class and you have not used it before you should figure out how you and your students will get access to GENI. Read the SignMeUp page for more details.
    • Depending on the nature of the event there are different ways to setup access for your attendees
  3. Create a Project for your event.
    • Use a separate project for each class/tutorial you are organizing. This will make the account management easier.
    • We also strongly recommend to add an expiration date for your project. The expiration date should not be right after your event in case the students want to experiment for a bit after, but it should be close. We suggest to use 1 week after your event.
    • Add any other instructors or teaching assistants to the project as Admins. This will allow them to help with the management of the project and with debugging problems with the students.
  4. Choose exercises and test them
    We maintain a list of tutorials/assignments that you can use out-of-the-box. If you decide to use your own exercises we suggest you start at least a month before the date you are planning to use these new assignments. If you design new assignments/exercises we would appreciate it if you send them along to add them to our list so that other instructors can benefit as well.
    • Pre-reserve resources are planning to use. This will notify resource admins to keep an eye for problems and will allow GMOC to help you work around resource-maintenance and other outages.
  5. Decide what machines the student should use.
    Depending on the exercises and the event students might use their personal laptop, or lab machines etc. Also consider whether you need to create a VM for your students.

Approximately one week in advance

  1. Email pre-work to attendees
    • Gain access to the GENI portal. This may require some manual intervention, so it's important that people do this early.
    • Include laptop requirements if attendees are using their personal laptop
    • Instructions about downloading/installing the VM if you are using one.

Before first exercise

  1. Bulk add attendees to the project (doing this in advance makes the exercise go more quickly)
    • If this is the first exercise plan to handle students that have not done the pre-work, work with them as they login to the Portal and join the project.

Setup access for attendees

Depending on how much control you have over who is attending your GENI event you have two options about how to give access to GENI to the participants:

  1. Personal GENI accounts. If you have control, or you know in advance, who is going to need access to GENI, then you should ask them to join your project and get individual GENI accounts. This approach works best for classes, or in tutorials that pre-registration is required.
  2. Temporary Tutorial accounts. If your event is a one time tutorial, and access to GENI is needed only for the duration of the event then you could ask us to create for you a set of temporary accounts as part of your project. In your email please include:
    1. the name of your project and whether it is a project at pgeni.gpolab.bbn.com or at the GENI portal
    2. the number of temporary accounts you will need
    3. the prefix for your accounts, all accounts will be of the form <prefix>uxx, the prefix should be at most 7 characters long and should be indicative of your event. For example if you are doing a tutorial at SIGCOM 2013, then the prefix can be sig13
    4. the email address that you want us to use as alias for the account email addresses. Each GENI account is associated with an email address so that experimenters can be notified about their GENI resources, in the case of temporary accounts, we associate the email address to an actual email address, in that way you can be notified abou the activity of these accounts.
    5. the date, time and duration of your event

NOTE:For one-time tutorials we suggest a combination of the two above approaches, i.e. you should try to have your attendees get personal accounts before your event, but also have a set of temporary accounts for people that show up at the last moment, or have not done the pre-work before your event.

Presentation material

Over the years we have generated a lot of presentation material that you can reuse, there is no point in starting from scratch.

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