I fought for a very long time to get the ability to turn off lab solutions in the Academy. I was very pleased when it finally happened:
This allowed me to enroll students into the Academy using it as a a way to get students more familiar with Red Hat and as great resource for content delivery and lab instructions.
We need to keep in mind that, as an academic institution, we use labs to assess students' progress (meaning this is how they earn their grades).
But then there's something like this (which is by no means the only example), from RH124, Chapter 11, Section 7:
OK, fine. Except that this instruction does not clearly tell the student everything they need to do. When looking at the solution (remember: the student does see this), there's this - for the same step:
This can be extremely confusing to most academic RH Academy students. One must keep in mind that the vast majority of academic students have never been exposed to Linux (or a command line).
Yes, Step 3 says, "Configure the necessary group ownership and permissions to allow this collaboration." But here's the issue: do this on/to what? It isn't clear.
Generally, when collaborating, the group ownerships and permissions are set on a directory and not a single file. This is supported by the first sentence of Step 3, "Verify that users in the techdocs group can create and collaborate on files in the /home/techdocs directory" (notice: "files," plural).
(Step 2 does change the directory's group ownership and turns on the sticky bit. It does not turn on the setguid bit.)
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This is by no means the only time where critical instructions, which can cause the grading script to fail, are hidden behind a locked Show Solution button.
Even worse, there are times when content (information teaching the student something) is hidden behind the button.
I get that the Academy content is being used to teach academic and commercial partners. I am very, very grateful that the resource exists.
What I'm driving at is that more attention needs to be paid to how the Show Solution buttons are implemented. One should always be asking: with the Show Solution button turned off, can the lab be successfully completed with the information given by some one with very little to no Linux experience?
A this point in time, the answer is this no.
