[LON-CAPA-admin] Running standalone lon-capa in a virtual machine

[Stuart Raeburn]

Bob,

> Is it feasible to install lon-capa in standalone mode in a virtual machine
> under VirtualBox on a Macbook for the sole purpose of coding new problems?

I expect so. How much RAM does the Macbook have?

I have a number of VMs, each with its own (different) Linux  
distro/version and its own LON-CAPA installation on a Macbook Pro with  
4 GB of RAM (although memory constraints limit me to running no more  
than three of those VMs simultaneously).  Personally I prefer VMware  
Fusion (not free) to VirtualBox (free).

If you go this route I would recommend using the same domain and  
authoring space username and folder structure as you plan to use when  
you copy content to the production environment, so that you avoid  
having to modify paths etc.

> We are thinking of hiring a computer science student to do some work for us
> and want to try to control what they have access to.  Any comments on this
> aspect of the situation would be welcome as well.

Here at MSU what has typically been done in this situation is for a  
domain coordinator to create an authoring space for a discipline or  
sub-discipline, rather than a user, e.g., GeneticsGroup, che-thermo  
etc., and then to assign co-author rights to the authoring space to a  
faculty mentor.  Students who then need access to the authoring space  
to code content are assigned assistant co-author roles in that space.

If those students need to import the content into a "course"  
environment they can also be assigned either a coordinator role in a  
community, or a custom role in a course, where the role's privileges  
exclude "Browse resources" and "Advanced role" at system level, but  
include "Browse own authored/co-authored published resources".


Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium

Quoting Bob Gonzales <rgonzal at binghamton.edu>:

> Is it feasible to install lon-capa in standalone mode in a virtual machine
> under VirtualBox on a Macbook for the sole purpose of coding new problems?
>
> We are thinking of hiring a computer science student to do some work for us
> and want to try to control what they have access to.  Any comments on this
> aspect of the situation would be welcome as well.
>
> Thanks,
> Bob Gonzales
> Binghamton University
> Chemistry Dept