Funded by Google, we have developed a Cloud Computing online course (CloudMOOC) using their Course Builder technology. CloudMOOC offers a repository of 10-20 minute lessons (‘songs’) drawn from the Course Builder library, which are assembled as a playlist into ‘albums’ (units, modules, courses). This is similar to the ‘Playlist’ that is a popular feature in YouTube and web-based music repositories. The customization will be explored using material from Indiana University to form a repository of lessons from which courses can be prepared. Our initial efforts will be aimed at online data science programs in an effort to help the U.S. meet a projected shortage of data analysts, data solutions architects and other data science positions of nearly 2 million workers by 2018.
The content of the Cloud Computing online course is hosted in the Google App Engine infrastructure and supports computing laboratories associated with MOOCs. Course projects are packaged in a sandbox VM along with the required environment setup or VM cluster support of massive online courses for hands-on lab experience using NSF FutureGrid testbed as a cloud backend. The MOOCs produce custom modules for courses optimized for data mining and data analysis applications that fit the desired research, education and training requirements. The CloudMOOC project has improved the basic course builder code by supporting a look and feel adapting to laptop, PC, or portable device.
We will explore community interest in building and using such MOOCs in a new X-MOOC repository, including open source learning management software from Google and edX. This will address a critical need faced by an increasing number of researchers and students for collaborative and reusable work in the Big Data area.