The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) is a national-scale computational science and engineering research and education program that trains graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in research techniques for using leading-edge cyberinfrastructure resources. This program has in the past been challenged to keep up with increasing demand and faces an acute need for a collaboration cyberinfrastructure to support its growing portfolio of courses and community of students. In response to this need, the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois is implementing the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering Network, a collaboration cyberinfrastructure to provide the VSCSE with research-based socio-technical systems for conducting synchronous and asynchronous learning through integrated research and education.
The VSCSE Network consists of a synchronous instruction environment called the Virtual Classroom, a HubZero-based online community and open educational resources repository and a Coordinating Center to provide staff support for network operations and outreach. This project is creating a set of ?Virtual Classrooms in a Box? to facilitate widespread adoption of the cyberinfrastructure. The VSCSE Network is being implemented iteratively, organized around annual Summer School courses. Each iteration features work to develop new capabilities to enhance the Network?s ability to support highly distributed, interactive, open and community-driven education, expanding the breadth, depth and openness of the VSCSE. This collaboration cyberinfrastructure facilitates the education and training of an entire generation of computational scientists and engineers able to exploit petascale computational power for scientific discovery and engineering innovation, enabled by 21st century cyberinfrastructure.
This project is extending the reach of the VSCSE by providing sustainable models for petascale training and education among faculty, students, practitioners, and institutions by developing the necessary infrastructure, processes, and mechanisms for current and future generations and by rigorously evaluating and assessing this work. The elements of the infrastructure includes research-proven, pedagogically effective methods for delivering synchronous and asynchronous content to large, geographically-distributed audiences, mechanisms for handling student registrations, pedagogically effective techniques for transforming live content into on-line self-paced tutorials, on-line mentoring networks to support learning during and after scheduled events, searchable peer reviewed repository of petascale training and education materials, and a larger, more diverse human network of experts to engage in future efforts.
Intellectual Merit: This proposal is building on the successful foundations established by the VSCSE between 2008 and 2010 to accelerate national adoption of live petascale training to reach graduate and postdoctoral students at multiple sites across the country simultaneously by applying innovative and immersive collaboration technologies. Transforming the materials produced from live events into stand-alone, on-line, learning materials to support self-paced learning requires the creation of new, pedagogically-based techniques for packaging open education resources. The Network is supporting integrated research and education on petascale computing topics that include the hands on use of leading cyberinfrastructure resources, such as TeraGrid and Track 1 Petascale systems.
Broader Impacts: To prepare significantly larger and more diverse generations of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians to advance scientific discovery, the VSCSE Network is connecting students, faculty, and researchers at institutions across the country including top-tier research universities and institutions that serve historically underrepresented individuals. The VSCSE Network will create a rich repository of open educational resources that can be adopted and used in a wide variety of educational settings and will provide a mentorship network for matching new scholars and students with established experts. The VSCSE also plans to work with international organizations to provide additional depth of content in the materials and to advance international research and education collaborations.
