ICEAGE Forum Agenda Geneva

EGEE Conference, Geneva Convention Centre, Geneva, Switzerland

1. Welcome, Introductions and Update
   1. Forum purpose (Malcolm Atkinson)
   2. Work in progress and related projects (Malcolm Atkinson)
   3. Challenges
2. Increasing the engagement with Education
   1. How do we connect with Academic decision makers?
   2. How do we engage with National decision makers?
   3. Suggest strategies
3. Policy relating to access - resources, students
4. ICEAGE publications
   1. Repository
   2. Format of publications
   3. Reports to inform policy
   4. Curricula recommendations - text book
   5. t-Infrastructure recommendations

This ICEAGE Forum meeting was held in conjunction with the first EGEE Conference in Geneva. As with the previous part of the Forum meeting in Washington, an introduction to the ICEAGE project and a review of the work already accomplished was given. This was augmented with a presentation of what had been achieved in Washington and a deliberate attempt to review and reconsider the issues raised there with the new audience.

Previous Forum meetings

Recommendations had been made at the first Forum meeting and the first part of this Forum on:

1. Educational communities to engage with
2. Forms of engagement with computer science teaching
3. Forms of engagement with application domain teaching
4. Initial suggestions on engaging policy and domain groups
5. Outline recommendations on curricula content
6. Tools for grid education

At OGF ET-CG sessions, recommendations have been made on semantics for sharing educational materials.

It was decided to review areas, which had not been examined at previous meetings and to profit from the experience of those attending the Geneva meeting.

Policy - student access

Information was gathered from the meeting on the policies towards providing access to e Infrastructures for students in different countries. Three examples illustrate the current variety of policies

• Greece - undergraduates get access as part of university registration.
• UK - post-graduates can be given access if they need to use the National Grid Service; however, there are many project, campus and regional grids, which adopt a variety of student access policies.
• Germany - the students given access to D-Grid are mainly post-graduates.

Although the coverage is limited, it appears that there are at least two models, one restricting access to students who are engaging in research (post-graduate) and the other providing access as part of undergraduate registration. This variation will have implications for any harmonisation of policies or for sharing t-Infrastructure resources between countries. This variety and its motivation have to be understood by ICEAGE before it can propose policies for access. This is a particular challenge as we are at a time of rapid change with many academic institutions establishing general purpose campus grids to support research.

Academic decision makers

Representatives at the meeting were asked to identify the individuals who would have the power to make policy decisions relating to the curricula within their academic environment. This was following up discussions begun in Ischia based on the recognition that if ICEAGE is to sell its message it must target the appropriate decision makers.

• Greece - academics decide what constitutes valid courses in their institution
• Germany - a similar situation prevails - in both universities and polytechnics courses are reviewed by a Faculty covering a group of disciplines.
• UK - an academic proposes, and these proposals are revised and refined by an academic committee covering a group of subjects, e.g. science and engineering, at a particular level, e.g. post-graduate. However, the UK Engineering Council, its designated professional bodies, e.g. the British Computer Society and the Institute of Engineering and Technology, or learned societies, e.g. the Royal Society of Chemists, set up standards, and syllabi for professionals in their discipline. This strongly influences university courses, as they have to be accredited as achieving the relevant knowledge, judgement and practical skills for students to proceed rapidly to professional status without having to take many additional examinations. Research councils supporting a doctorate programme also impose requirements on the training given. Modifying existing courses may be different from instituting new ones.
• Sweden - electives are decided by faculty or lecturers. Getting new material included in the core of a course is harder - something has to be removed. There is a National School for Graduate education.
• USA - decision-making is localised to faculty committees. Again, it is easier to introduce electives. State bodies regulate aspects of courses for state universities.
• European initiatives (ENACTS, ERASMUS).
• Ireland - similar to the UK.

In general, course content appears to be suggested by academics and then ratified at a school or faculty level. This indicates that an appropriate strategy for ICEAGE is to engage directly the academic teachers who may teach grid courses and get them to initiate efforts locally to introduce grids and their use into curricula. However, where there are national regulatory bodies, as in the case of the UK Engineering Council and its delegate bodies, it would then also be appropriate to approach them. ICEAGE should take advantage of the bodies that bring together relevant teachers, e.g. the Institute of Physics and the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing in the UK. Ineluctably, these need to be identified and addressed on a case-by-case basis in each country. A possible approach is to seek Forum members who are prepared to lead such action in their own country.

Engaging the education community

Support should be concentrated with enthusiasts, who need to be identified, as do potential future enthusiasts. We also need to support enthusiastic students, publish their results - maybe through the means of a competition. One of the potential barriers to encouraging supporters is the question of where e-Science results can be published. There can be a tendency for reports to be considered too much computer science for application domain publication and not sufficiently core computing science for publication in that realm.

Specific subject areas, which may have particular requirements should be identified: e.g. Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Biomedical Sciences and Earth Sciences.

Views of Grid computing may differ depending on the domain:

• Formal understanding of distributed computing - Computer Science
• Grid as a medium to do science - other domains.

Networks for students should be identified as a method for communicating directly with students; e.g. 'BEST' student network - summer course (http://best.eu.org/index.jsp).

Credits for summer schools have already proved important and students have already used ECTS credits gained from attending the ISSGC schools to access higher education courses (e.g. at the University of Lausanne). It is important that courses adopt and can be ratified against these standards to promote mobility of students. This is particularly important in grid computing as students can only benefit from being exposed international communities of practitioners and different approaches. http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/socrates/ects/guide_en.html

Specific recommendations were made on the best ways of supporting existing communities. These are listed below.

• Develop support for 'in-house' grid provision, e.g. grid-in-a-box & grid-in-a-room plus a community supported help and discussion list.
• Develop well-targeted information on how to set up a grid environment for teaching (cook book).
• Provide facilities for hosting students and their projects.
• Collect and provide concrete, self-paced examples - engagement scenarios (cookbook references).
• Give well-targeted talks - e.g. by going to relevant institutions or gatherings.
• Take advantage of dissemination opportunities with care over their cost effectiveness.
• Develop more mobility in connecting with academics - don't just focus on obvious institutions.
• Prepare and provide timely and interesting web information - ensure that this develops with contemporary information.
• There is only one chance to engage people, it must be used carefully - avoid hype.
• A single, well-judged story carries more weight in persuading potential users - a success story in their field.
• Provide information on the best practice in using grids - balanced to the needs of the application domain, i.e. how much understanding of the grid does a user really require?