NeSC Training Team Enabling, facilitating and delivering quality training in the UK and Internationally

Background The NeSC training team was formed in April With initially two staff it has now grown to five dedicated trainers. Members of the training team are supported by EU and Research Council grants.

Scope of training The training team has delivered training ranging from introductory material on grids to advanced courses for application developers and research leaders in other fields.

Courses delivered In the 6 months since its inception the training team has directly delivered: 5 training events in the UK (35 trainees - advanced)  At NeSC and the University of Stafford  For JISC and EGEE 6 training events in Europe (183 trainees – introductory/advanced)  At CERN, FZK Karlsruhe, CNB Madrid, Lithuania and Italy.  For EGEE Also dissemination presentations to introduce people to the concept of the grid

Coordination of training in Europe The NeSC training team is the leading partner for the training effort in the EGEE project. It coordinates and provides quality assurance for training with 22 partner institutions in 13 countries.

EGEE training delivery EGEE NA3 has trained more than 400 people in courses ranging from introductions to EGEE (induction) through Application Developer to Advanced level. NeSC is committed to maintaining and developing the quality of training. To do this feedback is collected from the users of courses.

Example: GGF Summer School The NA3 training team made a central contribution planning, organising and presenting the 2004 GGF Summer School. Presentations were given on “High-level Grid applications: a portal based approach”; “Introduction to Web Services”; + a tutorial “Introduction to the GENIUS portal and the GILDA Test bed” and “An Introduction to Data Services & OGSA-DAI” The event was attended by 84 selected advanced international students.

Internationally recognised teaching quality Example: NeSC training staff shared sessions at the GGF summer school with some of the leaders in the development of grid computing. eg. Carl Kesselman and Miron Livny

Demand for courses Many of the courses delivered by the training team have been heavily over subscribed. For instance the recent Madrid Web Services course was planned for 20 students and had 60 applications (300% oversubscription). Current demand for repeat courses outstrips the teams resources

Enabling training in the UK and Europe NeSC is providing web support for the EGEE training activity. Web traffic: Average successful requests for pages/day = 49. Distinct file requests/week = 116

Community support The EGEE training material is being made available to the whole community at: A training materials repository allowing flexible searches of the available material is currently under development and testing. Database design documentation available SQLServer Database created and populated Coldfusion interface under development Full attributions supported in the database

Involvement in research projects In order to maintain a high level of technical awareness the members of the training team are actively involved in research projects linked to NeSC For instance BRIDGES and EDINA.

Future plans The NeSC training team expects to be coordinating a further 16 courses for EGEE by the end of February 2005 Two more advanced courses will be delivered at NeSC by the end of February Modes of training are being developed to support local training at the UK eScience centres and other centres of excellence The training team is involved in developing teaching excellence for a grid MSc at Edinburgh University. The training team will be contributing to the NeSC workshop on Education and Training in UK e-Science Mechanisms to support eLearning for EGEE Installing a training grid resource for EGEE and the UK.