Renku simplifies teaching, giving students seamless access to course materials and interactive sessions directly in their browser—no installation required. Renku lets students focus on mastering the course material, without getting lost in setup. Renku’s focus on collaboration means it’s a great choice for courses with group work, too.

Onboarding course participants in Renku

In order to manage rights of the course participants into Renku projects associated to your course, they need to be registered in Renku. Therefore, ask them to create an account in Renku, as described in How to Create your Renku account, in advance before starting the course.

Managing access rights to course project(s)

We recommend you to create a group for your course following the instructions in How to create a group.

Add the course participants as viewers of the course group. This will make it so the participants can see all of the projects in the group, but they will not be able to edit them.

We recommend to add other course instructors as owners of the group so that they can edit all the projects in the course group.

Setting up the course with Renku projects

Depending on the requirements of the course, we propose several modes for setting up the course projects, as shared in the figure below.

Workshop Mode

Git Mode

Template Mode (available from Jan. 2025)

image.png

graph TD
  Save[Do participants need to be able to save their work?]
  Git[Are participants comfortable using git branches?]
  UCNoSave[**Workshop Mode**: Participants start sessions on a Renku project but don't save work.]
  UCBranches[**Git Mode**: Participants all work with a single project and shared code repo, working via git branches.]
  Pitch[**Template Mode**: Particpants create their own copies of a course template project.]
  Save -->|no| UCNoSave
  Save -->|yes| Git
  Git -->|yes| UCBranches
  Git -->|no| Pitch

Workshop Mode

If course participants only need to run sessions without having to save their work during the course, you can create a project (or a set of projects) for the course.

For creating the project:

  1. Create a Renku project as explained in How to Create a new project

  2. Add the data, if needed. See our collection of How To Guides for options for creating data connectors.

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  3. Add a code repository as explained in How to Add a code repository to your project with the course tasks