Your first course on Nuvolos

What you will achieve. By the end of this tutorial you will have joined your institution's Nuvolos organisation, created a course, added teaching material, invited a student, and seen their first submission come back to you.

How long it takes. About 30-40 minutes, plus the time it takes for an invited student to act on your invitation.

What you need before you start. An invitation email from a Manager at your institution, with the Faculty or Manager role on a Nuvolos organisation. If you have not received one, ask your department head or IT contact - Nuvolos is invitation-only and you cannot create a course without organisation

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Step 1 - Accept your organisation invitation

Nuvolos is an invitation-only platform. As an instructor, you can be invited in two main ways: directly to an organisation (the path this tutorial assumes), or to a specific course as a co-instructor or TA (covered separately in the how-to guide on joining a course).

To create and manage your own courses you need to be invited to an organisation with the appropriate role. The roles available to you are:

• Member - typically for students. Does not allow you to create courses.

• Faculty - the standard role for instructors. Lets you create courses, enroll students, and manage course environments.

• Manager - has all Faculty permissions, and additionally can manage organisation settings and invite other Faculty members.

For a more detailed description of all roles, see Roles and permissions in the Concepts section.

For this tutorial, you need either Faculty or Manager. Open the invitation email from your institution and click Review Invitation. If you do not already have a Nuvolos account, complete the sign-up process; otherwise sign in. We recommend proceeding with the recommended option for your institution (for example, SWITCH for Swiss higher education institutions). Click Accept Invitation. The first sign-up may take up to a minute to complete.

Checkpoint

You should now see your organisation's Dashboard. If you don't, refresh the page or sign out and sign in again. The Dashboard is where every course you create or co-teach will appear.

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Step 2 - Create your first course

A course in Nuvolos is an education-specific space - a workspace where you add learning materials (data, code, applications) for your students. Each course you create gets its own space, separate from every other course.

From the Dashboard:

1. Select + NEW COURSE.

2. Enter a course name and description. You can also add a README file at this stage if you have one ready.

3. Select + ADD SPACE.

4. (Optional) Select an application to add to the master instance of the new space - for example, a JupyterLab or RStudio image. You can always add applications later.

5. If you chose an application, enter a name for it and select + INSTALL.

Checkpoint

You should now be inside your new course, looking at the Master instance. The Master instance is the single place where you (and any TAs you invite later) develop and maintain teaching material - it is not visible to students by default. Everything you put here can later be distributed to every student in one step.

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Step 3 - Add a piece of teaching material

Course material is anything that supports learning: lecture notes, datasets, source code, slide decks. You always work in the Master instance - a sandbox dedicated to developing teaching material. You can run apps, upload files, and develop material directly here.

Pick one small file to upload now - a lecture PDF, a starter notebook, or a CSV. You can add more later.

1. Confirm in the breadcrumbs that you are in your new course and on the Master instance.

2. On the left sidebar, click the Folder icon to open the Files view.

3. On the top left, click UPLOAD and choose your file.

If you want to add a folder, compress it locally, upload the archive, and decompress it from inside one of your applications. For more on file management, see the File Navigator in Reference.

Checkpoint

Your file should now appear in the Master instance's file list. This file is currently visible only to you - students will not see it until you distribute it (the next step does that automatically as part of inviting them).

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Step 4 - Invite a student

With teaching material in the Master instance, you are ready to invite a student. For this tutorial, invite yourself using a personal email address (or a colleague who is willing to act as a test student) so you can see the full loop close.

From inside the course:

1. Click the Cogwheel icon and select Course Users / Instances.

2. Click + INVITE.

3. The default option is User invitation with Invite to individual instances. Leave both selected - this gives each student a separate, private instance.

4. Choose how to send the invitation:

Method	When to use
Invite link	Easiest option - share a link and anyone who clicks it joins the course.
Email	Better for smaller courses where you want to invite specific students.

For this tutorial use the Email method and enter your test address. Send the invitation.

Each invited student receives their own instance and cannot see the Master instance or other students' instances. Open the invitation email from your test address, click Review Invitation, sign up or sign in, and accept. You should now see the course as a student would - with the file you uploaded already present in your student instance, because joining a new course pulls in everything that has been distributed to it.

Checkpoint

If your test student does not see your file, return to the Master instance, follow the distribute-to-prospective-students how-to guide once to push the file out, then re-check the student view. Tutorial 2 walks through distribution explicitly.

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Step 5 - Create an assignment and watch it come back

An assignment is a special type of distribution designed for coursework. When you create an assignment, you distribute material to students and additionally:

• Set a deadline by which students must submit their work (a hand-in).

• Create dedicated storage for student responses and instructor feedback.

• Generate an audit trail of all actions taken in response to the assignment.

From the Master instance, prepare a small assignment file (for example, a notebook with one question, or a text file asking the student to reply with one sentence). Upload it as you did in Step 3 if it is not there yet.

Then create the assignment using the procedure described in the how-to guide on creating an assignment. Set a deadline a few minutes in the future so you can complete the loop now.

Switch to your test student account, open the assignment, make a trivial change to the file, and submit. Switch back to your instructor account - you should see the submission appear in the assignment's hand-in storage, ready to review.

You're done

You have created a course, added material, invited a student, distributed an assignment, and received a submission. Every later piece of work - adding a TA, structuring a more complex course, running graded assignments at scale - builds on these five steps. The how-to guides in Part B cover each piece in depth.

Where to go next

• If you want to bring in a colleague to help develop material, see How-to › Invite teaching assistants and co-instructors.

• If your course has more than one application, dataset, or large set of materials, see How-to › Structure your course for the recommended layout.

• To grade assignments and provide feedback, see How-to › Assignments, grading, and feedback.

• If you want to understand the model behind distribution, instances, and snapshots, see Concepts.