Transitioning Education and Training to a Virtual World, Lessons Learned

Abstract

Interaction is the key to making education more engaging. Effective interaction is difficult enough to achieve in a live classroom, and it is extremely challenging in a virtual environment. To keep the degree of instruction and learning at the levels our students have come to expect, additional efforts are required to focus efforts on other facets to motivate learning, whether the learning is relative to students in our academic courses, student internship programs, Summer Institute Series, or NSF/TACC s Frontera Fellowship Program. We focus our efforts in lecturing less and interacting more. Interaction now comes in the form of: ● taking a more casual approach to teaching ● gamifying the classroom ● giving students more choices regarding the path the curriculum follows ● constantly relating the educational material to the students’ current and future projects ● flipping the lessons where the students apply concepts in class ● integrating peer programming groups ● taking advantage of all the technology options at our disposal We have refocused our efforts on interacting with students using alternative means. As a result, we have built a successful academic and training curriculum, making our virtual classrooms more engaging and more collaborative, thus delivering a better educational experience. This paper will detail those efforts, what worked well, what aspects needed adjusting, how those adjustments were implemented, and how those efforts were received by our students. 1. RATIONALE TACC has a wide array of training and educational offerings, aimed at everyone from IT professionals to research scientists to graduate and undergraduate students to high school and elementary school students. Our approach to training and education is very similar no matter the audience, to build a sense of community. Teacher-student interaction is important. The more interaction there is, the stronger the learning experience can be. To create a positive learning environment, capable of meeting all of the educational needs, teachers must build a positive relationship with their students. Positive teacher-student interaction can be defined by shared acceptance, understanding, engagement, trust, respect, care, and cooperation. In a face-to-face classroom, this is a much simpler task. Trying to build a community with students online, can be more of a challenge. For this reason, TACC took a step back on our traditional approach, and through an iterative process, reimagined the classroom while still providing representation, recognition, understanding, intimacy, expectation, respect, care, and cooperation to bring the aforementioned community together online. By taking a more casual approach to teaching with multiple instructors and then integrating aspects of gamification, loosening the curriculum, applying lessons to current events, spending more class time focused on applying learned concepts versus lecturing on concepts, breaking the class into groups to make learning more intimate, and using all available resources and technologies into our classes, we were able build the needed teacher-student interaction to create a positive learning environment.