Academic courses increasingly depend on complex software environments. Reproducing those environments across student laptops is difficult, fragile, and time-consuming. For some classes, a better model is to move the course environment out of individual laptops and into shared cloud infrastructure, where students can access consistent, preconfigured environments through a browser.

This work started as part of the Open Education Project (OPE), which focuses on using modern open source technologies to help educators create, publish, and operationalize open educational materials. OPE provides tools for authoring course content, including open textbooks and containerized learning environments.

This presentation shifts the focus from authoring course materials to operating courses at scale. We will explore how academic courses can be run on OpenShift, drawing from lessons learned supporting hundreds of students in the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) every semester. The focus will be on the infrastructure and operational patterns needed to support real courses: deploying course environments, provisioning student access, managing shared cluster resources, and supporting browser-based workflows.

We will discuss how OpenShift can reduce student setup friction, improve reproducibility, and give educators a flexible platform for running modern computing courses.