Scaling training to infinity... and beyond!

Back in 2018, the University of California at Berkeley was able to scale their "Foundations in Data Science" course to more than 1,000 students because of JupyterHub. Since then, mybinder.org and on-premise deployments of JupyterHub had facilitate the use and learning of Python, R and other programming languages. Unfortunately, mybinder.org has a limited capacity and the deployment of JupyterHub is out of reach to many instructors. This posters announces a new open source tool called repo2wasm that provides a GitHub Action and a command line interface to instructors for the creation of a pre-configured Jupyter-like environment that is powered by Wasm (called JupyterLite) and have all the code running in the students web browser. repo2wasm is inspired and compatible with repo2docker used by mybinder.org. The Jupyter-like environment powered by Wasm and running in the students web browser enable instructors to scale their training course to "infinity" students without ever worry about configuring their own on-premise deployment of JupyterHub or the availability of mybinder.org. Another benefit is that the long term preservation of the Jupyter-like environment created by repo2wasm only requires a web server. More details about repo2wasm is available at https://repo2wasm.readthedocs.io/.