How I constructed an interactive OpenShift lecture for Red Hat Academy

Learning something new can require a lot of effort and Red Hat OpenShift is no exception. The platform has a significant learning curve. However, that's not meant to say it's hard to get started if you know how.

Red Hat Academy is an initiative within Red Hat that turns academic institutions into centers for enterprise-ready talent by outfitting them with Red Hat training and certification. If you get to know me well, you'll discover that I have a natural tendency to learn and contribute to the community.

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I have an extremely strong passion and almost unlimited energy to mentor others and, particularly, to nurture students who are fresh out of college. That internal motivation is driven by my nearly unconscious yet longtime belief that the best way to make society better and benefit everyone is to create a community where everyone is emphatic, shares knowledge, and helps each other.

Guest lecturer

For the past few months, through this great Red Hat Academy program, I had opportunities to visit many different universities as a guest lecturer to teach students about Red Hat OpenShift. Each lecture usually lasted for an hour, so I often had time to reflect on what did and did not work well, which helped improve the session for next time.

After some experimenting, I realized what works best is a class setting where I can accomplish the following objectives:

• An interactive session where everyone can participate in a lab setting.
• An environment that minimizes separate installation steps. Instead, everything should be done in a verified, working cloud environment.
• The instructor/moderator ensures no one gets left behind. The lecturer stops frequently to check that everyone is following.
• Let everyone have fun and get excited so that they can pursue further learning on their own. It's nearly impossible to learn everything in such a short time frame.

During the most recent lecture, I had each student deploy an interactive game of duck in Red Hat OpenShift's namespace. You can see how I did it in this video.

Preparing

An instructor who actually needs to teach OpenShift must be sure that the following steps are complete before the lecture.

First, an OpenShift cluster with a cluster-admin privilege has to be ready. Follow this video to see an example of installing a fresh new Red Hat OpenShift 4 on AWS, but you can deploy OpenShift on other environments as well.

During the classroom session, the instructor can walk the students through the steps to create the username and password. One of the easiest ways is to leverage htpasswd. I recently wrote an [LINK TO HTPASSWD and OAUTH] article on htpasswd here on Enable Sysadmin.

Finally, the instructor can further explain the industry's use cases for Red Hat OpenShift, some interesting metrics behind Red Hat OpenShift, and how knowing about OpenShift can help with a professional career.

[ A free course for you: Virtualization and Infrastructure Migration Technical Overview. ] 

Wrap up

That's everything I wanted to discuss on how to teach somebody Red Hat OpenShift in less than 10 minutes. A session might run for 30 minutes or more, but the actual installation step should not take you more than 10 minutes to complete.