As mentioned before, The EPcc Training and Education Centre (Epcc-TEC) is a division within the Epcc responsible for training and education of High Performance Computing, ranging from message passing to Computational Science. At the present, there are traditional courses, but there is a an increasing interest in WWW/Internet as an environment for distance training and education as well as for local..
Below is a list of some of the courses offered by the EPcc-TEC:
The EPcc offers certain advantages as a case study. The main one is that they already have a distance education program which takes advantage of the WWW as a media for delivering their courseware and already have some interactive material online on the Web. They also deliver their courses in a mixed delivery mode environment, i.e., they make use of a traditional classroom which includes a work-station on each desk and access to the WWW/Internet. We believe this to be advantageous to our research mainly because it gives us a local feedback of using the WWW as an education environment, even though the lecturer, the blackboard, and the slides projector is present. Hence, the EPcc will enlighten our research in two modes of course deliveries:
We assume we will have to put some work on the EPcc's distance learning setup, currently they are making use of a http package developed by their own team called EPIC (EPcc Interactive Courseware) . It consists basically of online courseware on the Web and a online tutorial where the student can down-load the necessary HTML files and CGI-scripts from the EPcc and use their own http server to execute the tutorial on their http client, by using this mechanism some of the load on computer resources of having interactive material is transferred from the EPcc to the student machine.