Status

09/14/22: Successful meeting with Everett. Dennis and Donal are instructor candidates in UMD AWS Academy. Dennis will pursue training and revisit syllabus draft in a few weeks. Happy to brief anyone on where we intend to go with this.

9/19/22: Dennis completed initial online training and can create courses in AWS Learner Lab (open ended sandbox, $100 per student); AWS Academy Cloud Foundations, AWS Academy Introduction to Cloud 1 and 2, and AWS Academy Data Center Technician, all of which have various relevance to the end of 346 and the various visions for 347. Next step is to complete some of these courses; understand the commitments implied by teaching them; and select what experiences meet our learning outcomes.

November 22: over 2/3 (120) INST 346 students are completing the AWS Cloud Foundations Course Module 0, 1 (S3), and 3 (Architecture) modules, 6 hours of instruction out of 20 total hours in that course. Evaluating for use of the entire course, and other AWS Academy resources, in 346 and 347.

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

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/

Amazon Data Centers

In IoT Lab - “Cloud Rack” (as small groups)

Syllabus Draft

Course Title: Cloud Computing Fundamentals

Course Number: INST 347

Term: Spring 2023

Credits: 3

Course Format: Online; blended

Faculty: Dennis Frezzo and Donal Heidenblad

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

• Seeking ebooks:

  • Comer 2021: The Cloud Computing Book

  • Hoff 2017: Explain the Cloud Like I’m 10

  • Vergadia 2022: Visualizing Google Cloud 101

  • 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:

• 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: Minimum grade of C- in 346.

Student Learning Outcomes:

After successfully completing this course you will be able to:

• Articulate and apply the major benefits of cloud computing

• Build simple models of physical and virtual cloud computing infrastructure

• Differentiate amongst compute, storage, database, and network functions in the cloud

• Analyze major cloud service provider’s services

• Design and implement a cloud solution with architectural, economic, and security constraints

• Design and critically evaluate existing designs for cloud computing users from diverse backgrounds with varying needs, applying anti-racist perspectives to ensure usability needs are met

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 cloud computing resources, online labs.

• Midterm and Final: Take-home individual events to help gauge your progress.

• More Details in ELMS

Approximate Weekly Schedule