Not to sound critical but this something every SSA should know, namely, what a Rule-Admin-Product (RAP) file contains.  IMHO students should not have everything already installed on a VM or build everything from scratch - students should also install files. 

For example, you would go to Pega Marketplace to obtain Deployment Manager (https://community.pega.com/marketplace/search?q=Deployment).  To use DM you need to install the two RAPs, PegaDeploymentManager and PegaDevOpsFoundation.

A RAP file can be a zip or jar. Zip is the default if no extension is specified when creating the RAP. You can append ".jar" to the file name when generating it and Pega will honor that request.

A RAP file contains two jar files: schema.jar and rules.jar. Do NOT attempt to import these files separately.  Just point Pega to the RAP and it will do the reverse of what it did to generate the RAP.