Your comment is bringing back so many memories of being in university and working around the anachronistically strict limits the uni sysadmins had on the network
Ah yes, one of my favorite skills learned in school was how to work around arbitrary rules made up by cranky sysadmins! I still use it all the time.
The smart kids (whom I’m sure look like they are learning that precious openssh client) are doing their assignment locally or on a free tier VPS with VS Code and scping the thing over when it’s done.
They’re also smart enough to learn openssh when they need it IRL.
In the class which I have managed the infrastructure for, we have 1 to 2 students per VM, so this is less of an issue and there aren't any restrictions.
One of the reasons we provide the VMs is so that students can experience working in a remote server environment. The concern that I have is that these remote ssh tools allow you to bypass learning/practicing how to perform basic actions, e.g. cd, read/edit files.
Granted, as mentioned, you can scp/rsync (or git pull), but at least this seems to be more appropriate when you eventually need to interact with a real production server.
