LSU Broadcasts Live with Two High-Definition Courses in Spring 2008 Semester
LSU is leading the way for education in the 21st century, offering two courses taught via video streaming to give students broader choices in their college curricula.
The LSU Department of Computer Science will offer both courses, using networking and high-definition (HD) access capabilities through the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, to export and import them.
LSU Department of Computer Science Professor Thomas Sterling pioneered this teaching method in the Spring 2007 semester after working with a team of researchers from the CCT, MCNC in North Carolina and Masaryk University in the Czech Republic to develop HD streaming and Access Grid applications for educational purposes.
Sterling’s course, CSC 7600 -- High-Performance Computing: Models, Methods and Means, was the first of its kind in the United States. Sterling taught the course at LSU, and broadcast it across the 10-Gigabit-per-second Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) to sites in Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina and the Czech Republic.
Sterling will teach his course again in the Spring 2008 semester, with four additional universities – Louisiana Tech University, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville and Little Rock campuses and Masaryk University in the Czech Republic -- signed on to participate.
Sterling will teach the course on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:30 a.m. until noon in Johnston 338, and will broadcast the course in real-time to the partner sites. The students at those schools will take the course through LSU, following Sterling’s syllabus with professors on site at each partner school to monitor coursework. Students will receive course credit through their home universities.
After the first run of the course, Sterling and LSU researchers received National Science Foundation funding to distribute the material through other media, including a DVD series and iPods containing the lectures.
“This teaching method gives college students more options than they ever had before,” Sterling said. “Previously, students were limited to taking whatever courses their universities offered, and if a professor at that university did not teach a certain course, the students just did not have access to it. Now, we are leveling the playing field in college education, and making a subject broadly available to a much broader audience.”
LSU also will offer a course in Spring 2008 that will use the same setup in reverse. Students will be able to take the University of Illinois – Chicago’s video game design class, offered at LSU as both a computer science course (CS 4700) and an arts course (ART 4020.)
Jason Leigh, a computer science professor at UIC and director of the university’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, will teach the course from Chicago and broadcast it via LONI to students at LSU, who will follow the same syllabus and requirements as the UIC students.
Through HD streaming access, the students will attend Leigh’s class in real time each Friday from 2 – 5 p.m. during the spring semester. LSU Department of Computer Science Professor Gabrielle Allen and School of Music Professor Stephen David Beck will monitor the students’ work and progress.
LSU offered the video game design course for the first time during the fall 2007 semester, and Allen said it was so successful, the University will offer it again in the spring.
"In organizing these two classes we have an opportunity to rethink how to provide the best education to our undergraduate and graduate students, not just at LSU but across the nation,” Allen said. “We have a chance to offer a broad, deep and up-to-date curricula in computer science, making some of our classes available externally and bringing some excellent teachers at other universities right into our classrooms here."
CCT in the News:
Nonprofit Hospitals Go High-Speed
1-2-2008/Daily Report
A $15.9 million grant from the Federal Communications Commission is being used to implement digital record-sharing at more than 100 nonprofit and rural hospitals around Louisiana. http://www.businessreport.com/archives/daily-report/2008/jan/02/402/
FCC Grant to Aid Doctors
12-10-2007/The Advocate
The Federal Communications Commission has provided a $15.9 million grant aimed at giving doctors in Louisiana’s rural hospitals instant access to a patient’s electronic medical records, state health officials said Monday. http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/12350476.html
CT Briefs
1/1/2008
TERAGRID CENTERS. The National Science Foundation recently awarded grants to five high-performance computing centers for their participation in TeraGrid, a nationwide research infrastructure that encompasses HPC resources. For the prestigious awards, NFS selected Purdue University (IN), the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative based at Louisiana State University, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (www.SDSC.edu) based at the University of California- San Diego, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas-Austin. http://campustechnology.com/articles/57057_2/
Pats On The Back:
Jian Tao successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis at Washington University on the topic "general relativistic numerical simulations with adaptive mesh refinement: construction of tools and applications to neutron star processes.” Jian is a postdoc at the CCT working in the Cactus group on the ALPACA project.
The Third Edition of "The Mathematical Theory of Finite Element Methods" by Susanne C. Brenner and L. Ridgway Scott, has been published by Springer Verlag.
Daniel S. Katz is associate editor for a new publication, “International Journal of Grid and High Performance Computing.”
Upcoming Lectures:
· The Spring 2008 Colloquium Series will commence Friday, Jan. 18. Please note that this semester, CCT has readjusted the Colloquium start time to Fridays at 11:30 a.m. in Johnston 338. The time change is meant to accommodate various conflicts with meeting and the room’s availability.
· Shantenu Jha is managing the Spring 2008 CCT Colloquium lecture series. If you have speaker or topic ideas, please e-mail Shantenu at sjha@cct.lsu.edu.
· Pete Beckman, University of Chicago Computation Institute, will deliver the first Colloquium lecture series for Spring 2008 on Friday, Jan. 18 at 11:30 a.m. in Johnston 338. Beckman will lecture on “An Infrastructure for Emergency, On-Demand, and Urgent Computing.”
· Hongchao Zhang, University of Minnesota, will deliver a special guest lecture on “Recent Advances in Box Constrained Optimization” on Tuesday, Jan. 15 at 3:30 p.m. in Johnston 338.
· Johnny Guzman, University of Minnesota will deliver a special guest lecture on “Superconvergent Discontinuous Galerkin Methods” on Thursday, Jan. 17 at 3:30 p.m. in Johnston 338.
Please Note:
· The Spring 2008 semester begins Monday, Jan. 14, 2008. Students will return for classes at that time.
· The 15th annual Mardi Gras Conference will take place Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 2008 at the Hilton in downtown Baton Rouge. Daniel S. Katz, Ph.D., is hosting this year’s conference. Please see www.mardigrasconference.org for more information.
· CCT will host the Finite Element Circus and Rodeo March 5-8 on campus. Please contact Dr. Susanne Brenner if you have questions or would like to participate.
· The Red Stick International Animation Festival will take place from April 16-19 in downtown Baton Rouge.
· If you have any news for the CCT Weekly, please e-mail PR Manager Kristen Sunde directly at ksunde@cct.lsu.edu.
Upcoming Grant Deadlines:
NSF Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering
NSF REESE
January 08 2008 5:00 pm
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07595/nsf07595.htm
NSF Instrumentation for Materials Research (IMR)
NSF IMR
January 10 2008 5:00 pm
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07600/nsf07600.htm
NSF - U.S.-China Collaboration in Mathematical Research
January 17 2008 10:00 am
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08015/nsf08015.jsp
NSF Software for Real-World Systems (SRS)
NSF SRS
January 17 2008 5:00 pm
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07599/nsf07599.htm
Publish Date:
01-08-2008
