NeSC Training Team Enabling, facilitating and delivering quality training in the UK and Internationally

WSDL, 17 th October 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

WSDL, 17 th October Background The NeSC training team was formed in April 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.

WSDL, 17 th October 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.

WSDL, 17 th October 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

WSDL, 17 th October 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.

WSDL, 17 th October EGEE training delivery 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.

WSDL, 17 th October 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.

WSDL, 17 th October 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

WSDL, 17 th October 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

WSDL, 17 th October 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

WSDL, 17 th October Web site Central list of all training courses planned and historic throughout Europe Central site for registration to courses Monitor of training performance

WSDL, 17 th October Community support The EGEE training material is being made available to the whole community at: 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

WSDL, 17 th October UML diagram of NA3 materials repository

WSDL, 17 th October 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.

WSDL, 17 th October 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.

WSDL, 17 th October 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}.

WSDL, 17 th October 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)

WSDL, 17 th October 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-Metadatanot present (higher level) Identifierpresent Technicalpresent (equipment/personnel) Locationpresent Rightsalways open LOM Optional fields Keywords present Educational/Difficultypresent (level) Resource typepresent Relationpresent (module/course) Kindpresent (various) Annotationpresent (comments)

WSDL, 17 th October 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

WSDL, 17 th October 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.

WSDL, 17 th October 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 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.