The education world has moved from analogue mediums to digital. This offers teachers the opportunity to take advantage of tools and features that can decrease their load. Teachers can use modern software solutions to offload tasks to infrastructures which can automate the tasks that they would usually do by hand. 

We have identified assignment checking as a task which can be automated with the help of current software development techniques. In IT education assignment checking can be handled using automated unit tests. Tests can be run to automatically check good coding practices using linters, as is done in many Open Source projects to enforce standards, look for edge cases and more by using pipelines to automate the effort.

We have developed the vmchecker-next framework which connects to the Moodle e-learning platform and runs assignment tests using the CI/CD suite found in the GitLab platform to connect students to real-life development practices such as running applications in containers, running in CI/CD applications, while reducing teachers workloads.