. Even as students returned to in-person learning, many continued to rely on their personal computers rather than embracing university-provided labs. However, this shift to decentralized, heterogeneous environments introduced a variety of information technology and instructional challenges.

The recent emergence of lightweight, container-based virtualization presents a unique opportunity to address these challenges by offering standardized environments on decentralized platforms. To investigate this opportunity, we implemented lightweight virtualization for three undergraduate computer science courses with a total enrollment of 188 students.

Figure 1