[snuxoll]

I like the vagrant-ish approach (just, not using Vagrant, shared folders are way finnicky in many different circumstances and it just really defeats the purpose of the tool if you aren't paying extra $$$ for the VMWare provider), personally. May not have been a classroom setting, but when I was training one of our new developers who had 0 Python or Linux experience (we're mostly a .Net shop, wasn't a hiring criteria) I had him install Fedora Server (CLI-only) in a VirtualBox VM. We then used the built-in deployment and remote execution / debug facilities in PyCharm Professional to test code inside a sane environment (because installing psycopg2 on Windows is not sane) while he was able to use his familiar desktop to actually do everything else, after setting deployment up it was pretty much transparent.

Where feasible, I think the "code locally, run remotely" concept works quite well, especially as most IDE's support at worst FTP upload.