Electronic Communications: Education Via a Virtual Workshop

Abstract

We have designed and implemented a virtual workshop, a workshop where the participants are distributed across the United States (and occasionally further afield), learning by interacting with their own computers. In this paper we will describe our virtual workshop design and what we have learned from the first three hundred participants. The topics covered in our virtual workshop, by the nature of our mission, relate to technical, high-performance computing. We will not go into any detail about the contents of the workshop but describe instead the structure and implementation that we believe carry over to many other topics of education. The virtual workshop is a self-paced course. In addition to the on-line materials, we provide consulting support and access to our high-performance computer the IBM SP2.