Faculty sought for Virtual School

The Blue Waters project is launching a three-year effort to create a model for offering online credit-bearing courses to students across the country and is seeking faculty interested in offering courses to address high-end computation in all fields of study. Faculty are invited to help design and deliver web-based graduate courses that provide students with the opportunity to advance their computational knowledge and skills while earning graduate credit at their own institution. The results and lessons learned on this innovative approach for enhancing education will be published collaboratively.

The Blue Waters Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering has received three years of funding from the National Science Foundation to prototype the delivery of online graduate-level credit courses. The program seeks to offer specialized computational science and engineering topics that are not generally available on campuses.

The Blue Waters team is seeking letters of interest from faculty to teach a full semester online course on a topic related to high-end computational analysis to prepare graduate students to address today’s research challenges in science, engineering, and/or computer science. The courses will be offered online for credit to students at institutions across the country with the participation of local faculty members at those institutions. Course lectures will be delivered as asynchronous online videos. Assignments will generally consist of a mix of quizzes, exercises, and a project.

The Blue Waters project will help defray video production costs, hosting of the materials, a stipend for the instructor(s), a central TA to support student questions, and central course management services such as assistance with obtaining an educational allocation on Blue Waters or on XSEDE systems, as appropriate.

Interested faculty are asked to send a one- or two-page summary, including the course title and short abstract for the proposed course content, computing system requirements for exercises, local capabilities for recording course lectures, and a brief biography of the instructor(s). Please indicate when you would be interested in teaching such a course–during the spring of 2014 or later. Please send the information to Steve Gordon at sgordon@osc.edu.

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