Julia Mullen
For decades the HPC community has created, published and shared education and training materials through classes, webinars, tutorials and websites. We all know that there are excellent teaching materials for everything from teaching basic Linux skills to illustrating high level application concepts, but as the amount of material has proliferated, our ability to search through and discover specific content has been compromised.
In speaking with community members during SC17, it became clear that we all seek ready-to-use materials in the form of well-designed lessons complete with explanations and working code examples, full tutorials with hands-on activities or portable training materials but quickly become overwhelmed by the huge number of sites and lists of materials. Through these conversations it became clear that we needed a plan to streamline the repositories and sort the materials in order to ease the discovery process.
As a first pass, the educational materials could be sorted based on audience type, K-12, informal, professional, academic (undergraduate or graduate student) or on topic, Linux, MPI, OpenMP, etc, or on material type, website, tutorial, code, or perhaps some other characteristic. Recognizing the discovery challenges and community frustration, but not wanting to reinvent the wheel, we established the Educational Content committee to develop recommendations for
- Creating a single or a few repositories in order to simply the discovery process
- The format and design of fully portable, well documented and tested code examples, and
- Guidelines for the review and acceptance of new educational materials.
We are currently reviewing tools that focus on the discovery process and existing repositories such as GitHub, Open Educational Commons and HPC University before we provide any recommendations. To aid our planning and discussions, we have created a survey to capture the needs and priorities of the HPC Education community. The survey can be found at: link.
We appreciate any input you can give, completion of the survey, joining the committee, following us and giving feedback on our Slack Channel #sighpced-content.