Access to Computing Education Using Micro-credentials for Cyberinfrastructure
Dhruva K. Chakravorty, Richard A Lawrence, Zhenhua He, Wesley A. Brashear, Honggao Liu, Andrew J. Palughi, Lisa M. Pérez, Yang Xin, Jacob Pavelka, Ritika Mendjoge, Marinus Pennings, Randy McDonald, Gerry Pedraza, Sunay V. Palsole · The Journal of Computational Science Education · 2023
In response to an increasing demand for digital skills in industry and academia, a series of credentialed short courses that cover a variety of topics related to high performance computing were designed and implemented to enable university students and researchers to effectively utilize research computing resources and bridge the gap for users with educational backgrounds that do not include computational training.The courses cover a diverse array of topics, including subjects in programming, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence/machine learning, bioinformatics, and cloud computing.The courses are designed to enable the students to apply the skills they learn to their own research that incorporates use of large-scale computing systems.These courses offer advantages to generic online courses in that they teach computing skills relevant to academic research programs.Finally, the micro-credentials obtained from these courses are transcriptable, may be stacked with existing degree programs and credit-bearing courses to create a larger degree plan, and offer a meaningful mechanism of adding to a student's resume.