Honing HPC skills through blended learning

Senior Education Specialist and Director of the Ralph Regula School
,
Ohio Supercomputer Center
Monday, January 11, 2016 - 2:55pm

Steve Gordon, OSC senior education lead, and team share trials and errors in distributing a virtual HPC course

While high performance computing is accessible and applicable to a wide range of fields, the unfortunate fact is many researchers and university students have limited skills in this arena. I recently conducted an experiment on a blended learning approach to HPC coursework, along with professors at participating universities. Published in Computing in Science & Engineering, the article details two different applications of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Experiment (XSEDE) education program, “Application of Parallel Computers.”

The program was first offered as a massively open online course (MOOC) in 2013. Initially, 376 people registered for the course. XSEDE service providers worried about the peak demands on compute resources near assignment due dates, but these worries were quickly squelched when the number of active participants dropped to 145 after the course began. As the course continued with assignments, student participation steadily dropped until the number reached 18 at the end of the course – 5 percent of the students who originally registered.

The Illinois Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Initiative (I-STEM) conducted a survey of those who registered for the course. Of those who did not complete the course, 88 percent cited time and 30 percent cited lack of background knowledge and skills as their greatest barrier. The survey indicated most participants would be willing to try another course and learn more about XSEDE resources and opportunities.

We chose to offer the course again in 2014 through a blended learning approach known as a SPOC: small, private online course. This time, 158 students at 18 institutions registered for the course through their home institution to receive academic credit. Local faculty members served as advisors to these students and were responsible for grading and altering provided XSEDE assignments as they saw fit for these students. Most ran the course by combining online and face-to-face components. This time, 91 percent of students completed the course.

We found that blended learning provides an effective symbiotic model to bring advanced computational courses to more students at more institutions. The prepared, online content allowed local faculty to provide a course for students that they otherwise didn’t have the time or resources to get off the ground themselves. The face-to-face component enabled students with a weaker computing background to seek the individualized help they needed to complete the course.

Many faculty and students indicated in a post-course survey that they would be interested in participating in future XSEDE projects and services. As the XSEDE team moves forward with this new data, we can provide more specialized, accessible training for upcoming generations of HPC users.

Read the entire Computing in Science & Engineering article here. OSC offers XSEDE HPC workshops throughout the year. Check our events page for upcoming training.