Contest rules and guidelines  (Page 2/5)

As always will be the case with open online educational resources, what you are holding in your hands may have and has likely been updated online. We urge you to visit the Open Education Cup collection at http://cnx.org/content/col10594/latest/ to review the most up-to-date content. For the ultimate definition of the rules for the contest you should always refer to (External Link) .

Contest overview

Open Educational Resources is offering the High Performance Computing community a unique opportunity to accelerate the education of the next generation science and engineering workforce. We all recognize and have read the reports reminding us that:

• Parallel computing is becoming ubiquitous. While 10 years ago only the largest servers used parallel processors, today even lonely laptops sport dual- (and soon multi-) processor chips. It is clear that soon all software, if it is to effectively use the hardware, will have to run in parallel.
• Too few students are learning parallel computing concepts. This is particularly true at the undergraduate level (and below), where few introductory textbooks or curricula tackle the subject. As long as parallel computing is considered an advanced topic, the supply of parallel software will lag behind.
• Creating teaching materials about parallel computing is difficult. Writing or updating a textbook on any subject is difficult and time-consuming at best. Keeping up with a fast-changing field like parallel computing magnifies that problem exponentially. Worse, a ubiquitous change like parallel computing forces changes in all areas of the curriculum.

We believe OER will be a key component for addressing these needs. The idea behind OER is to make high-quality educational material freely available to teachers and learners so that they can master and enhance the material, in the same way that the Open Source movement has furthered the production of software. Once OER content exists, it can be picked up, used, and improved by a large and growing community. This creates a vibrant “ecosystem” for teaching and learning about a topic. In the context of parallel computing, we have already mentioned the need to create educational modules. Putting parallel computing modules into an OER system will allow others to comment on them, improve them, add to them, and (most importantly) learn from them. If the parallel computing community embraces OER and starts sharing its knowledge, it can rapidly help build the education and training materials needed to train learners, disseminate new information, and take the field to new heights.

The Connexions project at Rice University is a technology platform supporting OER for authors, educators and learners. As an open source / open content educational project, Connexions can host, distribute and serve as a platform for authoring and maintaining educational material. It provides excellent support for OER, including establishing a framework for new collaborators, providing and encouraging reusable content (modules), accepting a variety of input formats and supporting in place editing. It already hosts over 7000 educational modules in areas ranging from Fourier analysis, signal processing, statistics and physics to music theory. We have chosen Connexions as the platform for the Open Education Cup in order to have a convenient, scalable and reusable central repository for all the modules submitted.