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Open Code and Culture at Merced’s New Collaboratory
by <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature2Author" -->Gordy Slack <!-- InstanceEndEditable -->
.................................................. <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature2Story" -->The School of Engineering at UC Merced is taking a countercultural approach both to its IT needs and to teaching. By focusing on open source, both as a software infrastructure for the school and as a way to teach and learn engineering, the school is bucking one national trend and trying to create another.
“You would never buy a car without being able to look under the hood,” says Jeffrey Wright, Dean of Engineering and Director of CITRIS at UC Merced. “And you would never try to teach auto mechanics without being able to show your students under there, either.”
Jeff Wright, Dean of Engineering and CITRIS Director at UC Merced
At the UC Merced School of Engineering, open source software—software developed in a free and accessible environment that is visible both to other engineers and end users—is not just a programming standard. It is a metaphor for the entire community, says Wright. “We are striving to cultivate an open source university, an open source culture. We do not want our students to be intimidated by software or hardware,” says Wright.
And perhaps the best expression of that is the University’s new CITRIS-supported Collaboratory, a computer teaching lab with an innovative and distinctly open source flavor. The Collaboratory opened for undergraduate engineering classes in the fall of 2006.
The affordability of an open source framework is no small thing for a brand new university that is building its computer labs and infrastructure from scratch. Because the software is free and safely adaptable, and because the Collaboratory’s systems are so efficient, says Wright, the new lab was built and runs on just a fraction of the budget of a typical lab its size.
The Collaboratory’s IT is designed to be both cost effective and operationally efficient because it is completely reliant on free and open source software (FOSS), commodity hardware, minimal administrative intervention, effortless remote access and interaction, and student-to-student and student-to-instructor interactivity. Furthermore, it has been designed entirely by its users. “The users own it,” says Wright.
The Collaboratory at UC Merced allows for an open, interactive environment
Operationally, the Collaboratory consists of centrally-bootable mini-box servers at each of its sixty seats. The lab is free from upgrade-hungry private-domain software, and it can run on longer-lived, low-end technology that adds years onto the life of a system. Also, because it is open source, it is safely modifiable. When faculty members wants to add a function or do something new , they do not have to go out and buy a whole new system. “It comes in at about fifteen percent of the cost of running a typical teaching lab,” says Wright, “and less than fifteen percent of the energy consumption of a typical lab.”
“But open source at Merced is not just about inexpensive software,” Wright says. “There is also an educational pedagogy here that drives our classes. We are trying to get our students to think differently about information technology by placing an extremely strong emphasis on information and its management rather than on the technology.”
The lab’s functionality is designed by the faculty, another key advantage of open source, says Wright. “Whereas the traditional approach to developing such a facility is to approach vendors, who will happily say, ‘Here, this is what you need, because it’s what we’ve sold to others,’ the open source approach asks: ‘What functionality do we need to provide students the learning experience we wish them to have? Now let’s build it,’” says Wright.
For instance, faculty have developed within Collaboratory a component that allows individual student work sessions to be displayed on a central screen or on screens at multiple locations. The instructor or other students can interact with and control that session and work on documents together. If a student is having trouble with a problem, for example, the instructor can bring that student’s work on screen before the entire class and work through it with everyone.
Not all students, or the instructor for that matter, need to be physically present in the lab, says Wright. Because the lab is equipped with microphones, cameras, and speakers, the students can engage in a class sessions from outside the lab’s walls, and faculty can teach from anywhere.
This adaptability also helps the School of Engineering accomplish
another of its CITRIS-supported objectives: forging collaborations with
local community colleges and high schools to better prepare students at
those institutions for programs like those at Merced.
“We
are not just pushing courses out over the Internet, the way other
programs might.” says Wright. “Rather, we have a course presence here
at Merced and a course presence there on, say, the community college
campus; our students and theirs can actually be interactively taking
the same course at the same time.”
“We need to improve the eligibility of students coming into our program, and typical high schools and community colleges need better access to appropriate courses and subjects,” says Wright. Use of the Collaboratory can facilitate those goals and efforts are currently underway to install collaboratories in several regional high schools.
Though a part of the School of Engineering, the Collaboratory is not limited in use just to teaching budding computer scientists. The lab is open and available to all faculty at UC Merced for a wide variety of courses, even those unaccustomed to such technology. Several biology courses have used the Collaboratory, and faculty members are interested in using it for courses in history and psychology.
The lab is open to all UC Merced faculty for their courses
Another reflection of the program’s open source culture is its emphasis on getting students to develop real software solutions for real organizations that need it. One class, for example, is developing information management systems for a local battered women’s shelter in Merced as a part of the Schools Engineering Service Learning program. “The students work collaboratively with each other, their professors, and with the end users—the clients and administrators of the shelter—to make applications that address the shelter’s specific needs,” says Wright. For instance, the shelter needs a document organization and management system that supports low-income clients, and it would also like to develop an Internet-based counseling system for giving off-site support to shelter alumni.
UC Merced engineering students are also developing a cell phone input system for emergency alerts to the shelter and will refurbish and network inexpensive PCs and convert them to open-source-compatible Linux nodes. Off-the-shelf proprietary software, while it might accomplish some of these things, would be unlikely to conform completely to the shelter’s needs.Assistant professor Alberto Cerpa escorts his undergraduate students at Merced into real-world projects, too. In one course, after grounding them in basic open-source programming languages, Cerpa assigned his students to develop Merced-based Google-Maps-related projects that would contribute something to the community. One student obtained crime data from the Merced Police Department and made an application allowing people to search for available housing in the safest neighborhoods. Another student developed a map of all local gas stations that provided up-to-the-minute price information.
“Doing important and useful real-world work while learning computer science may draw a whole new kind of student into the field,” Wright says. By focusing on the content, and not just the programming itself, Merced aims to keep students interested and engaged.
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For more information:
<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature2Links" -->UC Merced School of Engineering: https://eng.ucmerced.edu/soe/