Education as a Grid Service

Education as a Web

(Grid) Service

National GEC Network Meeting

Bethseda Maryland

August 22 2001

Geoffrey Fox

PTLIU Laboratory for Community Grids

Computer Science, Informatics, Physics

Indiana University

Bloomington IN 47404

Personal Background

l http://aspen.csit.fsu.edu/collabtools

l “From Computational Science to Internetics: Integration of Science

with Computer Science

http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/internetics2

l I wandered through various twists and turns

– Caltech -- Professor and Executive Officer Physics, Dean

Educational Computing

– Syracuse – Physics/Computer Science; Developed web-based

tools for Telemedicine and Distance Education

– Indiana – Physics, Computer Science, Informatics; Director of

Grid Laboratory

– Co-founder of companies WebWisdom and Anabas in areas of

education technology

l A mix of technology and its use – today I will focus on technology

as that is my expertise (although you are probably more interested in using it) _{1994 Demonstrating Web-based}

Telemedicine

2

Some Technology Trends

l

Increasing performance

of Internet backbone and last

mile (access)

l

Hand-held

devices and

wireless



Pervasive Access

Peer to peer technologies

enable new ways of

collaborating and blurs distinction between clients and

servers

l

Client-Server



Multi-tier

Architectures

l

XML Schema

and tools



All data defined as

objects

Separation

of client, system and persistent storage

models for information

l

Development of

(application) service model

to capture

common (maybe centralized) capabilities

l

Semantic Web,

Grid

or … “Next Generation Web”

New Opportunities requirin typically New Business models

For Education and Training ₃

What is a Grid Service?

l The Grid is distributed system allowing communities to access

seamlessly heterogeneous resources from heterogeneous clients

– Resources are web-pages, instruments, Object repositories,

Simulation codes running on supercomputers ….

l A Service is a generic application or capability respecting

standards (general web and application specific) allowing multiple providers to compete on a given service

Back en Capababilit y

Middle Tie Broker

Portal is

customizable User

interface _Resourc

e

The Grid is essentially is the future Web

IBM just announced they were investing aroun

$1 Billion in Grid

4

Some General Grid Services

l

Business is developing “web service” concept to support

areas like e-commerce where one composes atomic

services like

– Security

– Payment

– Catalog

– Goods supply

Securit

y Catalog

Paymen Credit

Card

Warehous e

shipping

Each of these services could allow Multiple choices of provider

In a given session

WSDL is new standard for web services

5

Architecture of Grid: Commodity



Science

l

Commerce, Entertainment, Healthcare, Science,

Computing, Education …. will be Grid Services

Science Portals & Workbenches

Twenty-First Century University and laboratory Computational Services P e r f o r m a n c e

Networking, Devices and Systems

Grid Services (resource independent)

Grid Fabric (resource dependent)

Research Services & Technology

Research

Grid ComputationalGrid

Community Portals Next Generation Consumer Web Education Services Business Services Commerce

Grid EducationGrid

Features to be Supported

l

Curriculum or

“Learning Objects”

–

Web Pages becoming more sophisticated

(Flash)

l

Audio-Video

Conferencing,

Chat rooms,

white boards

to

support student, teacher, mentor

interactions

l

Shared Documents for synchronous collaboration

Learning Management Systems

–

Student registration, Quizzes, Grading, Security

Database Storage (persistent Learning Objects)

l

IMS

and

ADL

standards for interoperability

Asynchronous

self paced access

7

Some Education Grid Services

l

Registration

l

Performance

(grading)

Authoring

of Curriculum

l

Online laboratories

for real and virtual instruments

Homework submission

l

Quizzes

of various types (multiple choice, random

parameters)

l

Assessment

data access and analysis

Synchronous Delivery

of Curricula

l

Scheduling

of courses and mentoring sessions

l

Asynchronous access, data-mining and

knowledge

discovery

8

ADL Learning Management Model

er Applicati_on

Brows er Adapt er Server Side Client Side HTM L+ Services or Adapter Cours eInterchan ge: Cours eStructu re Format (CSF), Metada ta Runti me Environme nt: Launch, API, Data Model “Learni ng Managem entSyste m”LM S Common Gri Services & Objects Client Server

www.adlnet.org

Good but …

Client-Server not Multi-tier Not built in terms of services

3-Tier Architecture for Education Portal

l Everything is an Object: Curriculum, Users, grades, computers –

all are defined in XML

l XML very important in online education as objects quite small,

are naturally decentralized and have rich important metadata

l There are several important Object

Models: COM, CORBA, Java, Exce

Web, flat file, Oracle Database ……

l But model doesn’t matter!!

Database

File Syste (Web Site)

Or

Middle Tie “Business Logic

dissociates User and Back End

Export/Import

Reques t

Information

Objec Repository

XML

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Portals in Education and Training

l We are discussing Web-based education

or portals to a virtual university or virtual corporate training center

l Merrill Lynch predicts that Enterprise

Information portal market will be $15B by 2002

l So assume that we are building education

portals in terms of “Distributed

Educational Objects” -- this is not really an assumption but a statement as to

“language used”

l Portals are built as a Collaborative

customizable set of XML components ( e.g. Display a thumbnail of the next web-page in lecture, give in-class quiz or run a

Particular Multi-media clip )

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Why use Distance Education and Training?

l New and rapidly changing Curriculum suggest the use of distance

education as it will allow a few experts to deliver instruction to more students and this addresses both

– The shortage of trained faculty

– Offering classes with small enrollments at one university

– cost of developing new curriculum QUICKLY requires many

students (say around 5-10 times traditional class) to amortize cost

l Distance Education is technically sound based on web

curricula--both synchronously and asynchronously -- today with very robust clear implementations available over next few years

l Both delivery mechanism and identification of knowledge nuggets

that are smaller than or different in content from a traditional degree suggests different approaches to certification

– Courses are given, graded etc. by multiple organizations

--University integrate degrees?

l Similar arguments for distance training with relative importance of synchronous and asynchronous learning differing by customer group

12

The Virtual University

l

Motivated either by

decreased cost

or

increased quality

of learning environment

l

Will succeed due to

market pressures

(it will offer the

best product)

l

Assume that as with text books,

only a few pedagogically

excellent teachers

will produce lectures; only a

few

charismatic souls

deliver them

l

“Centers of Excellence” (“Hermits Cave Virtual

University”) are natural entities to produce and deliver

classes supported by

good technology and wonderful

graphics

l

University acts as an

integrator

putting together a set of

classes where it may only

teach some 20% but acts as a

mentor to all

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Courses at Jackson State

l Taught using Tango since fall 97 over Internet and defense high

performance network DREN twice a week from Syracuse

– Course material based on Syracuse Senior Undergraduate class

CPS406(Web Technologies) and graduate classes CPS615/616/640(Base Computational science/Internetics)

– Curricula, Homework, Grading, Facilities done by Syracuse – Students get JSU NOT Syracuse Credit

l Jackson State major HBC University with many computer science

graduates

l Do not compete with base courses but offer addon courses with “leading

edge” material (Web Technology, modern scientific computing) which give JSU (under)graduates skills that are important in their career

l Fall 99 Semester CPS640 offered to 40 students in 5 distant places and separately 40 at Syracuse

l Fall 2001 restart with “latest technology” (Access Grid, HearMe, Garnet)

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Architecture of Tango Distance Education

NPAC We Server JSU Web

(Proxy)Server

Java Tang Server

…….

Share URL’s Audio Video

Conferencin Chat Rooms White Boards etc.

Address at JSU o Curriculum Page

Teacher’s View o Curriculum Page Student’s View o

Curriculum Page

Participants at JSU Teacher/Lecturer at_NPAC

…….

HTTP

Java

Control Clients

All Curricula placed on the Web

15

What is Web-based Collaboration?

l Collaboration means sharing objects (Web Page very important

object)

l Web-based Collaboration implies use of Web to share distributed

objects accessible through the Web

– Shared Web Pages; Resources accessed through Web Servers

or Brokers; Client-side applications with programmatic interfaces such as Java Physics Simulations

We

Page PageWe

Specify Page

We Page

Receive Identical Page

Web Site

Shared Page

Shared Pointer

16

> Two Shared Physics

Simulations – SHO and

Vector cross produc

> Chat Roo

> Audio video conferencing

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What did this lead to?

l

Jackson State students got access to curricula that was not

otherwise available to them

l

Developed quite good

Information Technology and

computational science curricula

l

Jackson State faculty acted as mentors in course and now

teach some of material in their own courses and to other

HBCU colleges

–

Make rapidly changing and important curricula available

to an

HBCU network

-- could dramatically improve

curricula opportunities for HBCU students

–

JSU has institutional commitment to area

l

Used in

High School Java

, DoD wide training and

Winter 00

semester as part of

ERDC Graduate Institute

l

Supports

migrant teachers

-- I have delivered course spring

00 semester from Syracuse, FSU and ERDC, Vicksburg

18

Saturday Java Academy

http://old-npac.csit.fsu.edu/projects/k12javaspring99/

19

Hierarchical Delivery Model

l

One could teach to

1000 different students

– each at a

separate workstation but …

l

No real opportunity for questions so better to use

broadcast technology – not conferencing

l

Further could better deliver to 40 classrooms – each

with an average of 25 students

l

Each classroom has central high quality A/V

conferencing, displays and

– A Mentor monitoring and helping students

– Each student could have wireless laptop or PDA

l

So synchronous systems must support simultaneously

disparate clients – high end display to PC to PDA

20

Authoring of Curriculum

l Market pressures push to high end authoring l Authoring approaches for the Web can include

– Basic HTML

– Macromedia/Adobe/etc. packages like Fireworks,

Dreamweaver, Illustrator

– PowerPoint and Word exported

l Also can include RealNetworks or Microsoft or .. Format

Multimedia

– Note Streaming multimedia formats have larger buffers than

A/V conferencing formats

l Certainly use XML to specify content and render this into

attractive portal

l SVG and SMIL are important 2D vector graphics and multimedia

standards

– HTML does not give reproducible pages

– Flash can be thought of as “proprietary SVG”

21

Current Status and Futures

l Commercial Systems such as Centra, WebEx, Anabas and

Placeware offer similar functionality to our old system Tango for

synchronous collaboration

– Shared applications, chatroom, whiteboard, A/V conferencing

l Blackboard, WebCT, Lotus offer learning management systems –

Can they switch to IMS, ADL standards; high-end authoring and XML based object technology (not databases or files)

l Access Grid (community e.g. classroom) and HearMe (desktop)

are new internet audio-video systems which are be used with shared object systems

l I develop research system Garnet for education portals

– Features hand-held and desktop clients, integrated

collaboration and some “technical advances” – major use of XML, shared SVG

l Peer to Peer Grids suggest decentralized architecture

(http://www.jxta.org)

22

Commercial

Collaboratio

Systems

Centra PlaceWar

WebEx

Groove Networks has interestin Peer-to-peer collaboration system

Anabas is integrating synchronou collaboration with learnin

management

23

SVG Sharing PC to PDA

PowerPoint can be converted to SV via Illustrator or Web export

Batik Viewer on PC

24

Access Grid (Argonne, NCSA) and HearMe

Ambient mic (tabletop)

Presente r camera

Audience camera

Presenter mic

Access Grid: Communit

HearMe: desktop integrates phone

and Internet Audio

25