Session: Seventh SC Workshop on Best Practices for HPC Training and Education

Transitioning Education and Training to a Virtual World – Lessons Learned

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

11:30 AM – 11:45 AM ET

Channel: Track 6

Author/Presenter(s)

S. Charlie Dey

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University of Texas, United States of America
Victor Eijkhout

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), United States of America
Lars Koesterke

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University of Texas, United States of America
Je'aime Powell

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University of Texas, United States of America
Rosalia Gomez

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University of Texas, United States of America
Susan Lindsey

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University of Texas, United States of America
Brandi Kuritz

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University of Texas, United States of America
JF

Joshua Freeze

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University of Texas, United States of America

Interaction is the key to making education more engaging. Effective interaction is difficult enough to achieve in a live classroom, and extremely challenging in a virtual environment. To keep the degree of instruction and learning at the levels our students have come to expect, additional efforts were required to focus our efforts on other facets to motivate learning, whether the learning was relative to students in our academic courses, our student internship programs, participants in our Summer Institute Series, or NSF/TACC's Frontera Fellowship awardees. We focused our efforts on lecturing less and interacting more.

Interaction now came in the form of gamifying the classroom, giving students more choices regarding the path the curriculum follows, taking better advantage of all the technology options at our disposal, taking a more casual approach to teaching, constantly relating the educational material to the students current and future projects, flipping the lessons so that the students become the instructors, integrating peer programming groups.

We refocused our efforts on interacting with students using alternative means. As a result, we built a successful academic and training curriculum making our virtual classrooms more engaging and more collaborative, thus delivering a better educational experience. This paper will detail those efforts: what worked well, what aspects needed adjusting, how those adjustments were implemented, and how those efforts were received by our students.