Probing OER’s Huge PotentialThe world needs good teachers — maybe you can help Rob Farber
People are the foundation of supercomputing. It is easy to lose sight of this fact in the hustle of getting new machines and bustle of getting results with the new technology. My last column highlighted the excellence of the Texas Advanced Computing Center staff in solving scale issues on their Ranger supercomputer so that I could be one of the first to achieve 0.363 petaflop in performance on that machine. In this column, I would like to focus on another essential ‘people’ element — how we educate and bring more excellent technical people into HPC.
We have all observed that parallel computing has become the de facto standard for HPC computers, applications and programming models. Yet, parallel computing is considered an advanced topic in classes and textbooks. As a result, too few students are being exposed to parallel programming and — most importantly for HPC —— to those concepts needed to support and use massively-parallel HPC systems.
To overcome this barrier, the people at Open Educational Resources (OER) are offering the HPC community the opportunity to educate the next-generation workforce with their Open Education Cup competition. Just as open-source software is available for the use and benefit of everyone, so are OER educational materials offered free-of-charge to the public. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation states:
“OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”
At Supercomputing 2008, I had the opportunity to speak with a number of visionary individuals who are attempting to take advantage of open educational resource opportunities. Jan Odegard and others at Gulf Coast Academic Supercomputing filled me in on how they are working to create textbooks, as well as other educational materials based upon the OER model.
On the Connexions OER Web site, I understand that all materials submitted will be made publicly available effectively in perpetuity for anyone to download free-of-charge. Material on the site is organized as individual modules that can be collected together as a textbook or for course material as desired. Each module is intended to have the content of about one lecture, or a few tightly connected lectures. Materials are available in a number of languages including English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, French, Portuguese and Thai.
The ramifications of the OER effort are potentially huge, since individuals from around the world will have access to quality educational materials at any time over the Internet — free-of-charge. Just as the Linux operating system and other open source software has become a pervasive computer technology around the world, so too might OER materials become the basis for training the global masses to use and extend HPC technology. Of course, OER materials need not be specific to a particular topic and can potentially benefit any field of endeavor.
Students interested in self-instruction can pick and choose topics and video lectures at will from the Web, while instructors now have the ability to create their own textbooks from selected materials posted on the site. These materials can be printed for a nominal charge or made freely available to students electronically. This model offers real potential for people in both developed and developing countries to educate themselves.
Do you have the ability to teach students about parallel computing concepts, managing technical efforts, or your particular area of expertise? If so, then check out Connexions and the other OER sites and fire up your word processor. The world needs good teachers!
Rob Farber is a senior research scientist at William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory Molecular Science Computing Facility, PNNL. He may be reached at editor@ScientificComputing.com.Related Resources
• Connexions
cnx.org
• Hewlett Foundation
hewlett.org
• OER
www.oercommons.org
• Open Education Cup
openeducationcup.org