Apr 12 – 16, 2010
Uppsala University
Europe/Stockholm timezone

Training in EGEE - creation of a sustainable user service

Apr 12, 2010, 4:30 PM
15m
Room X (Uppsala University)

Room X

Uppsala University

Oral Support services and tools for user communities User Support and Services

Speaker

Robin McConnell (NeSC)

Description

EGEE-III Networking Activity 3 (NA3) has the responsibility of coordinating and delivering user training and induction. The activity aims to train a wide variety of users, both those within the EGEE consortium and those from outside the project who make use of the EGEE Grid infrastructure. The presentation will present the evolution of training activities in the EGEE series of projects, provide a summary of its current services and highlight activities that make gLite-related training in Europe a sustainable service

Impact

To date within the EGEE-III project, our trainers have delivered more than 150 training events attended by nearly 2000 participants. The federal management approach adopted seeks to satisfy local requirements such as language, timeliness and content. Local trainers have to be flexible to take advantage of potential training opportunities arising with short lead times.
The EGEE digital library continues to collect course material and documentation to add to the wealth of material already present, with nearly 9000 items currently available. The library also provides a home to recently developed eLearning modules to enable self-paced learning and provide content for the online International Winter School.
The GILDA infrastructure developed within EGEE is available round the clock for tutorial sessions and individual users, with the number of contributing sites in creased in EGEE-III.
Feedback obtained from course participants has consistently improved throughout the life span of EGEE indicating the increased quality of the training events.

Detailed analysis

The provision of training is an important segment in the EGEE virtuous cycle, the project’s strategy for extending EGEE's base of users and communities.
This is realised with the use of an ever expanding portfolio of training material and resources designed for an ever-widening range of grid applications.
The activity provides central services to support the training teams. A web portal serves to assist advertising of events, and provide a gateway to the online facilities useful to trainers and users. A central digital library is also provided, allowing material created for and during EGEE-III training events to be made available to the community in a searchable way. The training activity provides a training infrastructure (GILDA), allowing realistic hands-on training.

Conclusions and Future Work

With the end of the EGEE project approaching, the training activity is looking to leave a legacy of training services which can be used by the future training groups. This includes a database of accredited trainers,
It is apparent that face-to-face training is not sufficiently scalable for large numbers of new users; therefore developing e-Learning practices is becoming increasingly important.

URL for further information http://www.egee.nesc.ac.uk
Keywords Training user induction e-Learning digital library

Authors

Presentation materials