Your way to manage Labs and Exercises in a training

[fmarchio]

Hi all,
I'm Francesco and I'm just beginning my journey as Instructor! In view of an upcoming training, I'd like to hear what is your preferred way to handle labs and exercises in a VT.
Basically, most Trainings have for each chapter multiple Guided Exercises and a Chapter Lab.

F.e.

Section 2.2: Guided Exercise: Navigating the Red Hat OpenShift Web Console
Section 2.6: Guided Exercise: Deploying Applications by Using the oc and odo CLIs
Section 2.7: Lab: Deploying Simple Applications

Is it a common practice to do Guided Exercises together with the class (sharing the screen with the Classroom) and then, assign the Final Lab as exercise? (no screen sharing). Basically, students they will run the Lab on their own and verify the result with the instructor.

I think this is a good format to educate students, although in a large classroom I might have to deal with multiple error types to manage....which could impact the course schedule...
Any thoughts/suggestions?
Thanks
Francesco

[dennisk]

Depends on how much time you have in class and whether you have virtual students in the classroom as well. I include lab notes in the Canvas LMS for each guided exercise poining out "gotchas.". For example, in step xx be sure to type rhel9 (for RHEL 9) in the URL not rhe19.

[dnaspliceoflife]

I would second Dennis's observation and add a possible "feature enhancement"?

I like to do the guided exercises together but they often take way longer than it would take if you just do a straight walk through.

I typically use the GE's as the "See it in action" portion of the theory/rationale for the skill they are trying to learn.

That is, at various points in the exercises I'll go on tangents and make references to content in the chapter they may have glossed over and earlier chapters to help them see the bigger picture; that the commands and skills are not just a series of discrete steps that are independent of one another.