Improving Teaching, Learning, Equity, and Success in Gateway Courses


Book Description

As long as there have been U. S. colleges and universities, there have been entry courses that pose difficulties for students – courses that have served more as weeding-out rather than gearing-up experiences for undergraduates. This volume makes the case that the weed-out dynamic is no longer acceptable – if it ever was. Contemporary postsecondary education is characterized by vastly expanded access for historically underserved populations of students, and this new level of access is coupled withincreased scrutiny of retention and graduation outcomes. Chapters in this volume define and explore issues in gateway courses and provide various examples of how to improve teaching, learning and outcomes in these foundational components of the undergraduateexperience. This is the 180th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Higher Education. Addressed to presidents, vice presidents, deans, and other higher education decision makers on all kinds of campuses, it provides timely information and authoritative advice about major issues and administrative problems confronting every institution.







Building a National Distributed e-Infrastructure -- PL-Grid


Book Description

The goal of the project is to provide the polish scientific community with an IT platform based on grid computer clusters, enabling e-science research in various fields. The created infrastructure is both compatible and interoperable with existing european and worldwide grid frameworks. The system ensures scalability and enables the integration of additional local clusters, belonging to universities, research institutions and technology platforms. This state-of-the-art survey describes the experience and the scientific results obtained by project partners as well as the outcome of research and development activities carried out within the Polish Infrastructure for Information Science Support in the European Research Space PL-Grid (PL-Grid 2011), held in December 2011 in Krakow, Poland. The 26 papers are organized in topical sections on: eclipse parallel tools platform integrated with QosCosGrid, the migrating desktop, science gateways based on the vine toolkit, the gridspace experiment platform, and the InSilico-Lab environment.




Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures


Book Description

The book describes the science gateway building technology developed in the SCI-BUS European project and its adoption and customization method, by which user communities, such as biologists, chemists, and astrophysicists, can build customized, domain-specific science gateways. Many aspects of the core technology are explained in detail, including its workflow capability, job submission mechanism to various grids and clouds, and its data transfer mechanisms among several distributed infrastructures. The book will be useful for scientific researchers and IT professionals engaged in the development of science gateways.







HealthGrid Applications and Technologies Meet Science Gateways for Life Sciences


Book Description

The integration of grid, cloud and other e-infrastructures into the fields of biology, bioinformatics, biomedicine, and healthcare are crucial if optimum use is to be made of the latest high-performance and distributed computer technology in these areas. Science gateways are concerned with offering intuitive graphical user interfaces to applications, data, and tools on distributed computing infrastructures. This book presents the joint proceedings of the Tenth HealthGrid Conference and the Fourth International Workshop on Science Gateways for Life Sciences (IWSG-Life), held in Amsterdam, Netherlands in May 2012. The HealthGrid conference promotes the exchange and debate of ideas, technologies and solutions likely to promote the integration of grids into biomedical research and health in the broadest sense. The IWSG-Life workshop series is a forum that brings together scientists from the field of life sciences, bioinformatics, and computer science to advance computational biology and chemistry in the context of science gateways. These events have been jointly organized to maximize the benefit from synergies and stimulate the forging of further links in joint research areas. The book is divided into three parts. Part I includes contributions accepted to the HealthGrid conference; Part II contains the papers about various aspects of the development and usage of science gateways for life sciences. The joint session is recorded in Part III, and addresses the topic of science gateways for biomedical research. The book will provide insights and new perspectives for all those involved in the research and use of infrastructures and technology for healthcare and life sciences.