About the 2008-2009 Open Education Cup

Open Educational Resources is offering the High Performance Computing community the opportunity to educate the next generation workforce. We all recognize and have read the reports reminding us that:

• Parallel computing is becoming ubiquitous. While 10 years ago only the largest servers used parallel processors, today even lonely laptops sport dual- (and soon multi-) processor chips. It is clear that soon all software, if it is to effectively use the hardware, will have to run in parallel.
  
  
• Too few students are learning parallel computing concepts. This is particularly true at the undergraduate level (and below), where few introductory textbooks or curricula tackle the subject. As long as parallel computing is considered an advanced topic, the supply of parallel software will lag behind.
  
• Creating teaching materials about parallel computing is difficult. Writing or updating a textbook on any subject is difficult and time-consuming at best. Keeping up with a fast-changing field like parallel computing magnifies that problem exponentially. Worse, a ubiquitous change like parallel computing forces changes in all areas of the curriculum.

It is worth noting that a number of national reports (e.g. the recent PCAST report, Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World) have made similar observations.

We believe Open Educational Resources (OER) will be a key component to addressing these needs. The idea behind OER is to make high-quality educational material freely available to teachers and learners so that they can master and enhance the material, in the same way that the Open Source movement has furthered the production of software. Once OER content exists, it can be picked up, used, and improved by a large and growing community. This creates a vibrant “ecosystem” for teaching and learning about a topic. In the context of parallel computing, we have already mentioned the need to create educational modules. Putting parallel computing modules into an OER system will allow others to comment on them, improve them, add to them, and (most importantly) learn from them. If the parallel computing community embraces OER and starts sharing its knowledge, it can rapidly build the workforce it needs, disseminate new information, and take the field to new heights.

The Connexions project at Rice University is a technology platform supporting OER for authors, educators and learners. As an open source / open content educational project, Connexions can host, distribute and serve as a platform for authoring and maintaining educational material. It provides excellent support for OER, including establishing a framework for new collaborators, providing and encouraging reusable content (modules), accepting a variety of input formats and supporting in place editing. It already hosts over 7000 educational modules in areas ranging from Fourier analysis, Signal Processing, Statistics and Physics to music theory. We have chosen Connexions as the platform for the Open Education Cup in order to have a convenient, scalable and reusable central repository for all the modules submitted.

The purpose of this competition is to jump-start an OER, using the Connexions platform, on High Performance Computing (HPC) and parallel computing. We think that, by offering modest inducements (monetary prizes, publications, and fame), we can quickly collect a wide variety of modules to teach parallel computing. By using Connexions tools to publish and host these Open Educational Resources, they will be freely available (published under the Creative Commons attribution license) to the students, professors, and teachers who most need them. Instructors and teachers can then choose their preferred sets of modules, thus creating a variety of courses that are engaging, comprehensive, constantly updated, and customized to their students needs. In the long term, such an OER repository and the collaborative courses in it can form the groundwork for a new way of teaching computer and computational science. This is admittedly a grand vision, but it is imperative that we start now to build core material for the coming wave of new computational learning.

About Open Education Resources:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning materials freely available in the public domain. A definition of OER from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is:

"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."

The term OER has been used to refer to learning materials such as:

• Learning objects (quizzes, crossword puzzles, flashcards, animations, etc.)
• Audio lectures
• Audio/Video lectures
• Images
• Sounds and music
• Entire course content and open courseware
• Collections of journal articles and institutional repositories
• Textbooks

In the context of the Open Education Cup, we will focus on OER as a collection of modules, which can be collected together as a textbook or course. Each module should have the content of about one lecture, or a few tightly-connected lectures.

About Connexions:

Connexions is a platform and repository for open education resources, enabling the creation, sharing, modification, and vetting of open educational material accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime via the World Wide Web. Since 1999, Connexions has pioneered digital education. The Connexions global knowledge ecosystem, where anyone can create materials, is free of charge. Connexions’ modular interactive information is in use by universities, community colleges, primary and secondary schools and life-long learners worldwide. Connexions materials are available in many languages including English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, French, Portuguese and Thai.

Through its partnership with QOOP, Connexions is part of an exciting new distribution system that allows for affordable print on demand and accelerates the delivery of educational materials into classrooms worldwide. At the same time the content in the book can be found and used, for free, on the Connexions web site.

 

 

 

If you would like to be put on a mailing list for updates and information about the
2008 Open Education Cup, please click HERE.