NeSC Training TeamEnabling, facilitating and delivering quality

training in the UK and Internationally

Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe (EGEE) project

• Framework 6 project

• To create ‘production’ grid in Europe for eScience (24/7) fully supported.

• Derived partly from European DataGrid

• Supporting the LHC experiments

Background

• The NeSC training team was formed in April 2004.

• With initially two staff it has now grown to five dedicated trainers.

• Members of the training team are supported by EU and Research Council grants.

Scope of training

• The training team has delivered training ranging from: introductory material on grids to advanced courses for application

developers and research leaders in other fields.

Courses delivered

• In the 6 months since its inception the training team has directly delivered:

5 training events in the UK (35 trainees - advanced)

• At NeSC and the University of Stafford• For JISC and EGEE

6 training events in Europe (183 trainees – introductory/advanced)

• At CERN, FZK Karlsruhe, CNB Madrid, Lithuania and Italy.• For EGEE

Also dissemination presentations to introduce people to the concept of the grid

Coordination of training in Europe

• The NeSC training team is the leading partner for the training effort in the EGEE project.

• It coordinates and provides quality assurance for training with 22 partner institutions in 13 countries.

EGEE training delivery

Overall feedback assessment

123456

EGEE NA3 has trained more than 400 people in courses ranging from introductions to EGEE (induction) through Application Developer to Advanced level.

NeSC is committed to maintaining and developing the quality of training. To do this feedback is collected from the users of courses.

0

100

200

300

400

26/04/2004 26/05/2004 26/06/2004

Total number of trainees

advanced total

app devel total

induction total

Example: GGF Summer School

The NA3 training team made a central contribution planning, organising and presenting the 2004 GGF Summer School.Presentations were given on“High-level Grid applications: a portal based approach”; “Introduction to Web Services”; + a tutorial “Introduction to the GENIUS portal and the GILDA Test bed” and “An Introduction to Data Services & OGSA-DAI”

The event was attended by 84 selected advanced international students.

Internationally recognised teaching quality

• Example: NeSC training staff shared sessions at the GGF summer school with some of the leaders in the development of grid computing.

eg. Carl Kesselman and Miron Livny

Demand for courses

• Many of the courses delivered by the training team have been heavily over subscribed.

• For instance the recent Madrid Web Services course was planned for 20 students and had 60 applications (300% oversubscription).

• Current demand for repeat courses outstrips the teams resources

Enabling training in the UK and Europe

NeSC is providing web support for the EGEE training activity.

Web traffic:Average successful requests for pages/day = 49.Distinct file requests/week = 116

Web site

• Central list of all training courses planned and historic throughout Europe

• Central site for registration to courses

• Monitor of training performance

Community support

• The EGEE training material is being made available to the whole community at: http://www.egee.nesc.ac.uk/trgmat/index.html

• A training materials repository allowing flexible searches of the available material is currently under development and testing. Database design documentation available SQLServer Database created and populated Coldfusion interface under development Full attributions supported in the database

UML diagram of NA3 materials repository

Relation to other archives (1)

As the resources available for this project are strictly limited and there is a need for a functional system to be created as quickly as possible, it is important to limit the design to a minimal set of core functionality.

This will allow a usable prototype to be created rapidly which can be modified to cope with future requirements, as long as extensibility is built into the system.

Relation to other archives (2)

There are many on going projects aimed at producing generalised materials repositories for education. These tend to have a number of features which are not required for the current EGEE repository.

For example:• The ability for many users to make depositions to the

archive.• Flexible access controls to facilitate copyright control.• Support for many different user communities.• Generalised support to cope with all possible forms of

material.

Relation to JISC online repository for materials (JOCUM) (1)

• The proposed EGEE repository can be viewed as a minimal set which corresponds with the definition of a Learning Object

• {quoted by JORUM as : “an aggregation of one or more digital assets, incorporating metadata, which represents and educationally meaningful stand alone unit”}.

Relation to JOCUM (2)

• Ability to map to Learning Object Metadata Core (LOM)

• Greatly simplified sub-set of LOM

• Many of the mappings will be static (particularly at higher level)

Mapping to LOM• LOM mandatory fields

Catalogue not currently supported (higher level)

Language to be added Description present Lifecycle to be added Contribute/Role present (authors) Entity present (organisation) Date present Meta-Metadata not present (higher level) Identifier present Technical present (equipment/personnel) Location present Rights always open

• LOM Optional fields Keywords present Educational/Difficulty present (level) Resource type present Relation present (module/course) Kind present (various) Annotation present (comments)

GILDA/GENIUS testbed

• INFN, Italy runs a grid test bed (GILDA) and portal (GENIUS)

• This is available and used for training by EGEE

• Used for directed and self paced learning

Involvement in research projects

• In order to maintain a high level of technical awareness the members of the training team are actively involved in research projects linked to NeSC

• For instance BRIDGES and EDINA.

Future plans

• The NeSC training team expects to be coordinating a further 16 courses for EGEE by the end of February 2005

• Two more advanced courses will be delivered at NeSC by the end of February 2005.

• Modes of training are being developed to support local training at the UK eScience centres and other centres of excellence

• The training team is involved in developing teaching excellence for a grid MSc at Glasgow & Edinburgh Universities.

• The training team will be contributing to the NeSC workshop on Education and Training in UK e-Science

• Mechanisms to support eLearning for EGEE

• Installing a training grid resource for EGEE and the UK.