Collaboratory: An Open Source Teaching and Learning Facility for Computer Science and Engineering Education

Jeff Wright, Stefano Carpin, Alberto Cerpa, German Gavilan, Marcelo Kallmann, Cameron Laird, Kyler Laird, Shawn Newsam, David Noelle

Abstract

In this paper we present an innovative prototype Open Source Teaching/Learning Collaboratory created at UC Merced that will provide the foundation for offering the vast majority of our Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) courses, as well as courses from across our engineering disciplines, and, increasingly, computer courses and computer intensive courses throughout our university. This prototype facility is in operation at the present time, with one and possibly two additional Collaboratories to be installed in time for our Fall 2007 session. In addition, this facility will provide the model and framework for other local and distance teaching activities planned for supporting curriculum development and computing training. We show that by relying on free open source software and commodity hardware we can build an education computing environment that minimizes administration tasks, provides effortless remote interaction, simplifies and enhances the computer science curricula that can be delivered to the students and minimizes both the acquisition and operation costs.

Availability

PDF

Reference

Jeff Wright, Stefano Carpin, Alberto Cerpa, German Gavilan, Marcelo Kallmann, Cameron Laird, Kyler Laird, Shawn Newsam, David Noelle, "Collaboratory: An Open Source Teaching and Learning Facility for Computer Science and Engineering Education," Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer Science and Computer Engineering (FECS 2007), pp. 368--373, IEEE, Las Vegas, NV, June, 2007.

Bibtex

@Conference{Wright07a,
  author =       "Jeff Wright and Stefano Carpin and Alberto Cerpa and
                 German Gavilan and Marcelo Kallmann and Cameron Laird
                 and Kyler Laird and Shawn Newsam and David Noelle",
  title =        "Collaboratory: An Open Source Teaching and Learning
                 Facility for Computer Science and Engineering
                 Education",
  booktitle =    "Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on
                 Frontiers in Education: Computer Science and Computer
                 Engineering (FECS 2007)",
  year =         "2007",
  pages =        "368--373",
  address =      "Las Vegas, NV",
  month =        jun,
  publisher =    "IEEE",
  URL =          "http://www.andes.ucmerced.edu/papers/Wright07a.pdf",
  accept =       "28",
  cited =        "4",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2007 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial purposes. New copies must bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.