Participating institutions were solicited via newsletter posts by XSEDE and through several mailing lists of faculty interested in computational science and parallel computing. Participating institutions have a lead faculty member responsible for local course administration. Those faculty:
- Create a local course at their institution for which students can register for credit
- Participate in conference calls with the course instructors and coordinators
- Provide guidance to their students via discussion of lecture materials and assistance with programming assignments
- Create a local grading scale that includes the online quizzes, programming assignments, and final project
- Grade the programming assignments assisted by the autograders provided by Berkeley
- Supervise and grade student final projects
The collaborating faculty also participated in regular online meetings to discuss the course materials and the pros and cons of course organization.
The course was offered two times under the workshop grant in the spring semester of 2017 and 2018. In 2017 twelve institutions participated in the workshop. That included several minority serving institutions, one foreign institution (Universidad de Medellin), and one high school (Marmion Academy). The participating institutions and number of students is shown in the next section. There were 92 students who completed the course in 2017.
In 2018, thirteen institutions participated with 211 students completing the course. The course again included several minority serving institutions and smaller colleges that might not have been able to offer this course to the few students that were interested and and sufficiently prepared.
