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Let change the way we deliver ISC content

By Robert Chesebrough (Intel) (8 posts) on September 10, 2008 at 9:50 pm

The Intel Software College Course Architect Team is about to head into our planning phase for 2009.  One of the tasks we are considering is how to make our Intel posted content easier to access, easier to update, easier for faculty to incorporate lessons into their curriculum.  As you probably are aware – currently you can download our standalone modules from the Intel Academic Community webpage on ISN - http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/multi-core-courseware-content-from-intel-1/.

 

While our current content deployment mechanism works, I fear that it may be more difficult than it needs to be in order to access our content. In most cases, our current model has a listing of modules with course description and a link to download a ZIP of our content, which includes powerpoint slides, student lab manuals, and ZIP’s of the various labs themselves. In the spirit of trying to find a more suitable delivery mode I have explored a number of online learning sites and I’d like to get your take on the pros and cons of these sites in comparison to what we currently offer.

 

The two sites I am looking into currently as roll models are …drumroll…

1)       Wikiversity (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page) and

2)       MIT Opencoursware (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm)

 

I don’t have enough time in tonight’s blog to analyze both sites – so I will cover one tonight, Wikiversity, and I promise to do the other one next blog post.

 

The first site I’d like to consider as a potential model for future ISC delivery is…

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Portal:Computer_Science. As a newbie member of this portal – look me up – I’m zmadscientist – I thought this approach to presenting lessons was pretty intuitive.  The lessons tend to be short, byte sized chunks.  They tend to be more verbose and text based and not so visually oriented as my home turf where we use a lot of powerpoint with punchy bulleted concepts. 

 

I looked up a several programming related topics to get a feel for the layout.  The two topics I looked up were Parallel Programming (doesn’t exist),  Threading (doesn’t exist), Parallel Computing, C++ programming with the  Alice Programming language.  My intent was to get a gut level feel for the efficacy of the lessons and delivery mode.

 

So to start - what I like about wikiversity is the simple layout and instant interaction with the lessons.  This is a wiki – so the layout is not consistent across all topics – but at least the C++ topic looked well organized.  And in one click I could get to a specific lesson – nice!

 

The layout for C++ is something like this:

1)       tabs across the top – resource tab laying out bulk of the content, discussion tab to get community feedback, then an edit and history tab that I am not as much into

2)       On the resource tab we see:

a.       Course title

b.       Course description, background discussion

c.       Pre-requisites

d.       Pros & Cons

e.       Lessons (hyperlinks to a wikiversity page specific to that one lesson)

f.         Enrolled – showing people registered who are interested in the topic

 

So kudos for ease of use and getting to the lessons!

 

But what about dynamic content? Content like showing how a data race can develop with two threads trying to access a shared variable.  Can that be done effectively in a wiki format?  I’m not convinced.

 

And what about the size of each lesson.  The C++ example, hello world, takes roughly two typed pages to explain.  This felt very toyish and rudimentary to me but maybe that’s appropriate for lesson 1  It still feels very spoon fed to me. Is this really suitable for topics like Threading Building Blocks, Win32 threads, OpenMP 3.0, or software tools with a load of graphic content to them like VTune Analyzer or Thread Checker?  We currently have over 4 hours of materials ~ 80 foils worth of compressed bulleted content on VTune analyzer alone. I can see that ballooning into a  hundred pages if we took the same approach – and that’s just VTune Analyzer.  I suppose this could be cut into a few tens of smaller lessons each maybe 10 pages long - but is that the right direction to take?

 

I suppose that screen shots can be embedded (we do that in powerpoint now) but I can’t find a simple way to animate graphics here – Well I suppose we could turn everything into flash tutorials but then its not really well suited to a wiki format then is it? And Flash seems too synthetic and constrained for the kinds of materials we currently offer.  

 

More advanced topics like parallel computing are described only at the highest level and no lessons are currently available – see http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Topic:Parallel_computing – so its hard to completely envision how ISC content could play into a wikiversity like model

 

Right now my take is that wikiversity offers an easier way to access content than the current ISC model – but it seems better suited to introductory materials like Programming with Alice and beginning C++.

 

So, what’s your take? Should ISC morph its online content area to be more in the image of wikiversity? 

 

Give me some feedback – how can we better server you? Is a different delivery modality even the answer? It would be a huge departure from what we are doing now - and would takes a bit of work to retool.  Is it worth it?

 

Next time – I want to take a harder look at how MIT offers content thru their OpenCourseware site.  Some of their material is phenomenal! – Look up Classical Mechanics (course 8-01) by Walter Lewin or Linear Algebra (course 18-06) by Glibert Strang! I’ve downloaded each of these to my ipod and have been watching them repeatedly.   

Categories: Academic, Parallel Programming

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