I have no affiliation with the Blender Foundation.
I am a concerned bystander who hopes that Blender flourishes.
I saw your post, and looked into it, hoping to be of help.

How much RAM do you have in your machine? (both on the motherboard and in your GPU)

Your "basic modeling and materials" file starts with a
396Mb .rar file, which contains a
829Mb .blend file.
Merely mentioning this would have saved me an hour of download time, and a further hour looking through your file which is clearly NOT just "basic modeling and materials".
Loaded into blender 2.80, this seems to be using about 6Gb of RAM (on the motherboard).
When the Shaders begin compiling, blender consumes all 8Gb of RAM on my motherboard, and begins backfilling into virtual memory (slooooooooowly).

It is almost certainly the case that you have created an A1-sized drawing,
and are concerned that it does not fit on an A4 sheet of paper.

If you ask someone else to help debug your file, be advised that highly descriptive names of key objects such as "plane.012" and "cube.003" are less than helpful.

Start by turning off the visibility of the hundreds of blades of grass and leaves, and as many unnecessary objects as possible (ie; EVERYTHING in the back room) to determine what you CAN actually render correctly.
Then work your way up (adding objects a few at a time to the scene) to determine your REAL capacity.

When I ask for a rendering of your file, and while the main blender window is telling me "Compiling Shaders", I repeatably get the error message "GPU failed to find function node_bsdf_hair" printed to a console window (command-line). The few materials that do render before that show-stopping error message confirm my suspicion that your idea of "basic modeling and materials" is somewhat aslant.

I love blender, and truly hope it succeeds, but I must express that I have serious reservations about your plan to use Blender 2.80 beta for class instruction. Tools used for education should _just_work_ . To force a class-full of students to become involuntary beta-testers is unkind at best. Have you considered Blender 2.79 for instruction purposes?