Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources
PDC Curriculum Early Adopter Grant and Summer Training Program
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The CDER Center is pleased to announce a summer program to help faculty incorporate Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) into courses for students in their first two years of undergraduate study.
Highlights:
$4250 grant to each of 16 participants
Grant recipients attend a one-week, online training workshop (August 10-14, 2020) hosted by UMass, Amherst Training includes PDC content, and educational evaluation methodology
Focus this year will be on Introductory Programming and Data Structures, courses
Recipients implement PDC course enhancements or new course(s) in academic year 2020-2021, then write and submit a paper describing their course experiment and evaluation experience
Instructors may also apply to just participate in the training, with no grant or other obligations.
Application Deadline: July 6, 2020
Notification: July 13, 2020
Program Overview
The $4250 grant is meant to be used in support of curriculum development. Because we have moved to online instruction, the grant does not include support for travel to the workshop this year. There is no fee for the workshop itself.
Training will be a combination of learning to use PDC tools, learning how to design and instrument an
experimental course for meaningful evaluation, and pedagogical approaches for engaging a diverse set of students in PDC studies.
The expectation is that grant recipients will develop experimental versions of course enhancements, or a new
course or courses, to be offered in the academic year following the training. Participants commit to preparing a paper that reports the results of their efforts, based on application of the evaluation methodologies covered in the training, and submitting it for publication. The grant is also intended to help support travel to present the paper. Any courseware that is developed will be contributed to the CDER exemplars public repository so that others may benefit from these course development efforts.
Grant Restrictions
US citizens will receive the grant as a stipend, and will be sent a 1099 miscellaneous income form at the end of the year. Non-citizens may only be reimbursed for actual expenses by submitting receipts to UMass.
Reimbursable expenditures would include, equipment, software licensing fees, supplies, guests speaker cost, etc., in support of the course development, and travel costs associated with presenting research results at a conference. Non-citizens may not use the grant money as supplemental income. We regret that we are not able, under NSF rules for disbursement of participant support costs, to route the grant through the participant’s institution. We also regret that we cannot support international participants this year. Participants from the 2019 training may apply for a new project, but priority will be given to those who have not previously received a course development grant. Because this year we are addressing the same set of courses as was covered in 2018, participants from 2018 may not reapply.
Application Process
To apply, submit a brief proposal to the CDER Center using Easy Chair. The proposal should include:
For each course that will be enhanced with new PDC content:
For each entirely new course that will be created to offer PDC content:
Apply through EasyChair using CDER Summer PDC Training 2020:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cdersummer2020
Also see https://grid.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=the-early-adopter-program.html for updates.