Experiences in teaching virtualisation with private cloud platform

Many universities are now offering courses that cover virtualisation related to cloud computing techniques. However, they have ignored the change in economic billing models caused by cloud computing. In our paper, we describe our experiences teaching virtualisation in an introductory curriculum to computers and network using the private cloud platform we developed. With this platform, every student could carry out labs and projects on the virtual machines, which would have been impossible otherwise. Over the past two years, our experience was a success overall. Each student has learnt pay-as-you-go billing models and some related virtualisation technology in the experiments. Furthermore, some reminders of the platform sufficiently prevent students from overspending. Average per-pupil expenses in the cloud were under CNY 100. Two labs and one project are designed to help the students to complete the assignment excitedly. As shown on the survey, 87% said they thought it should be retained in future course offerings.