Resources and tools for remote learning

Over the last few months, we’ve had a blast learning from our users and finding ways to improve online learning experiences.  As you can imagine this has been rapidly increased due the impact of COVID-19 and we have seen a tremendous interest from academia to provide virtual lab replacement with tools like:

• Azure Lab Services https://labs.azure.com/ 
• IDEs within the cloud using Visual Studio Code Spaces http://online.visualstudio.com 
• Blended learning with Microsoft Learn.
• Github Repos with Github Classroom 

One of the most consistent things we’ve heard is that the ability to create cloud-hosted dev environments is having a positive impact in more ways than we had thought. In particular, our users are finding that:

• The time it takes to onboard to new projects (or new tasks within an existing project) is much shorter
• The performance of their cloud dev environment in many ways feels better than their local environment
• The ability to easily switch between Visual Studio Code, the browser-based editor, or the Visual Studio IDE (in private preview) gives them the flexibility to work from just about any device
• It’s easy to collaborate with others since Live Share is built-in for co-authoring, editing, and debugging.
• Interactive Learning pathways and journeys using CodeTour
• Automatic Git commits for students work using GitDoc
• Support for any VSCode extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/vscode And language
• Microsoft Learn Blended learning resources http://docs.microsoft.com/learn
• Auto Grading and assessment of students work using Github Classroom http://classroom.github.com

We learned that developers are finding Visual Studio Online to be much more than just an “editor in the browser”.

They are saying that:

“the capabilities of this cloud-hosted dev environment make it the space where I want to write all my code“.

We believe that Visual Studio  Codespaces offers the best remote development experience on the market. We want to make sure as many people as possible have access to and use Codespaces, especially given the challenges we all currently face. To make that a reality, we’re lowering our prices over the course of the next week.

As we always have, we’ll continue to charge only for the time and resources you use (and not one second more!). While you’re active in a Codespace it leverages Azure compute resources.

The new pricing for each active Codespace breaks down like this:

Containers in the cloud or on the desktop

My personal favourite is our support for bring-your-own Dockerfiles or images. With this feature, a Codespace can be tailored to your exact specifications, either by pointing at an image from a registry like Docker Hub, or by placing a custom Dockerfile in your repository, which Visual Studio Codespaces will run and connect you to.

You can see a quick example at https://github.com/leestott/intro-Datascience

Try it now

Go give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments again you can all sign up for a Azure for Student subscription to evaluate and test the services see http://aka.ms/azureforstudents