Good Teaching Practices

  • Ask your students to contact a TA or you first with problems, then the TA or you can contact us with any new issues. Some teachers have even offered to take points off if a student contacts DETER Ops directly.
  • Make it clear to students that they are using a shared testbed, and should not leave their work for the last day before the deadline.
  • Ask students to promptly swap out experiments if they will not use them for at least an hour. They should save their work in their home directory before swapping out.
  • Ask students to set the idle swap out period to 1 hour. They should swap out manually whenever they are done with a chunk of work, but this setting will catch the cases when they forget to do so.
  • Contact us promptly if you run into any issues with experiment creation, lack of resources, etc. Communicate to us any small issues that frustrate you so we can improve our handling of classes.
  • Please make sure to explain to students the difference between using the control and the experimental network (see here), and make sure your assignment instructions minimize use of control network whenever possible.