Mesa Community College has just announced a partnership with Amazon to create a certificate program in cloud computing. The program will use AWS Educate as the LMS and it occurred to me that AWS Educate could be used to teach to the Red Hat certifications as well.
AWS Educate doesn't have curriculum but it does give students fee-capped access to AWS services which include running RHEL 8. With an edu email address you can set up a classroom for free and if you request no more that $50 credit per student I believe you will get it approved with no questions asked.
As part of this project I want to create scenario-based labs that test students' ability to think critically and take ownership of their own learning. No typing commands like a trained monkey without understanding why. Here is an off the cuff example of what a scenario-based lab might look like.
Acme Widgets has hired two contract workers for 1 year -- Jill Jones and Buffalo Bob Smith.
Your task as system administrator is to create accounts for each new employee that meet these requirements:
1. Contract worker accounts expire in 1 year from the date of hire.
2. Contract workers have UIDs from 2000-2999.
3. All contract workers are in the supplementary group contractors.
4. Contract workers must change their password every 60 days.
5. All new employees automatically receive a welcome.txt file in their home directory on account creation.
When you have completed the task submit the following screenshots:
1. The output of the chage command.
2. The output of the id command.
3. The output of ls /etc/skel.
Of course before tackling the lab students would be given appropriate resource material such as a lecture covering accounts in Linux and how they are created. The goal being that students would need to figure out on their own how to meet the requirements. Such as, "How do I create an account that doesn’t just use the next available UID?" (Aah, man pages!)
If any one else feels this would be worthwhile I’d love working together.
