Brief
Investigate creation of a follow-on course to 346 to give cloud computing for beginners more adequate coverage than is possible in 346. Separately but perhaps synergistically, ESG students have requested coursework in Cloud Computing.
Collaborator(s)
Dennis Frezzo, Donal Heidenblad, Galina Madjaroff
Text Ideas
Comer 2021: The Cloud Computing Book (free on reserve already)
Hoff 2017: Explain the Cloud Like I’m 10 (not yet available as ebook)
Vergadia 2022: Visualizing Google Cloud 101
Preliminary Resources
AWS Cloud Quest Role-Playing Game (with Free Tier)
AWS Academy (investigating UMD Institutional account/ meeting on 9/12/22 with DIT)
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/
In IoT Lab - “Cloud Rack” (as small groups)
Syllabus Draft
Prerequisites: 346, 362
Learning Outcomes
Course Title: Cloud Computing for
Course Number: INST 347
Term: Spring or Fall 2023
Credits: 3
Course Format: Online; blended
Faculty: TBD
Pronouns: TBD
Contact Information: TBD
Assistants: TBD
Class time and location: Section 0101. No class-wide synchronous meeting times, but weekly assignments are due (course is not self-paced). You will be a member of assigned study and project groups that sometimes meets online at mutually convenient times, including with the Professor.
Required Textbook(s)/Resources/Equipment:
● Course Website: http://elms.umd.edu
● eBooks available through the library, links within ELMS, so book purchase NOT required; paperbacks are available on Amazon:
o Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (5th Edition, 2019) by Sharp, Preece and Rogers (ISBN-13: 978-1119183938).
o Other eBooks as needs and opportunities arise
● Laptop (or desktop) computer onto which you can install software, and with an Internet Connection to ELMS and other services for labs and activities:
o Free software as needs and opportunities arise
● Smartphone, especially for audio and video recording to help with qualitative user research and to try small usability experiments
● Office supplies for low-fidelity prototyping (to be specified)
Course Schedule and Documents: The course schedule, reading plan, assignment instructions and rubrics, research resources, and other helpful documents will be available in ELMS.
Office Hours: The professor will hold office hours remotely, by Zoom (details in ELMS). In-person meetings with the professor can also be scheduled at mutually convenient times on campus. Details in ELMS.
Course Description and Objectives
Prerequisite: 1 course with a minimum grade of C- from (INST201, INST301); and minimum grade of C- in INST 326; and minimum grade of C- in PSYC100.
Student Learning Outcomes:
After successfully completing this course you will be able to:
● Articulate important historical, current and emerging trends, critical issues, and theoretical underpinnings of User Experience design.
● Articulate and apply major user experience research methods, such as user interviews, surveys, contextual analysis, diary studies, storyboarding, experience design, persona development, task description, sketching, video scenarios, use cases, and competitive analysis.
● Demonstrate the appropriate use of UX design artifacts such as flow diagrams, wire-framing, and paper prototypes.
● Apply data from UX evaluations to improve interfaces and interactive design through an iterative design process.
● Design and critically evaluate existing designs for users from diverse backgrounds with varying needs, applying anti-racist perspectives to ensure usability needs are met
To speak more plainly, I hope to help you 1) see the designed world a little differently, and 2) use a systematic set of methods that has been shown to help create better designs.
Course Activities:
● Online Discussions: to help you build relationships with other students despite the online nature of the course and to help you join the design community by using terminology and concepts.
● Quizzes: to help provide practice with feedback along the way.
● Homework Activities: to help you work through recorded lectures, home lab activities, web links, and online textbook reading, weekly.
● Project Assignments: we will learn and use a user-centered design process. One extra credit opportunity after Spring Break will be made available as part of the final project.
● Midterm and Final: Take-home individual events to help guage your progress.
● More Details in ELMS
Despite the online nature of the course, I am hoping it will be very collaborative. But quite frankly you will be cheating yourself if you do not stay accountable to learning certain concepts and skills individually. To help clarify, many instructors use the following chart – please feel free to ask me to clarify situation you find ambiguous. Check means OK; X means no.