The Nectar Cloud is Australia’s purpose-built cloud for research. 

Nectar, and its managed services such as the Virtual Desktop and Jupyter Notebook Service, can be used for teaching or training only if approved by the ARDC or a Node. In general, Nectar services can be used for training courses for researchers, but not for teaching university classes unless approved by a Nectar Node for a local allocation. 

If you would like to seek approval, you can submit a request here.  Alternatively you may also contact your local node as well. If this is approved, you will then need to request an allocation of resources. This is completed via the allocation form on the Nectar Cloud Dashboard. Here you will outline the specific amount of computing resources you will need. Additionally, we have advice for those who get approved to use Nectar for teaching/research training here. 

Can I just use the Nectar Project Trial instead?

A Nectar PT ("project trial") is a small Nectar allocation that is granted automatically to a user the first time that they visit the Nectar Dashboard. PTs have limited resources by time and capacity. These limits are set by policy, and they cannot be changed or extended, regardless of the nature of the request. These are sufficient for the intended purposes of a trial, but not for undertaking significant project work or teaching. PTs expire after 6 months, so if a student has used a PT for a course in a previous semester, the PT will probably expire before the completion of another course.