I think Krucible could be very helpful for you here. Each student could sign up for a Krucible account and spin up up to 25 free clusters. Should be plenty for teaching purposes.

You could also prepare a cluster with a certain configuration in advance, snapshot it and then create new clusters from that snapshot so that all students could quickly get started with a Kubernetes cluster in a given state.

Get in touch and I'd be happy to help you get things set up. Email is ben@usekrucible.com.

I'm the CTO of msb.com, we're building a k8s learning platform, and are now expanding into a larger ecosystem of adjacent technologies, from CI/CD pipelines to istio and such. We regularly spin up hundreds of clusters on demand which are free to use. Feel free to try out the platform at learn.msb.com or contact me at mislav @domain