Goals

Goals

THE USE OF ACTIVITY CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY IN THE ARCHIVING

AND DISSEMINATION OF DISCIPLINE SPECIFIC LECTURES AND

ADVANCED TRAINING MATERIALS

We are requesting funds for a specific software training project of direct relevance to the US ATLAS community. It is based on a novel capture application developed by Dr. Charles Severance, Associate Director of the University of Michigan Media Union. With this product, content-rich lecture and training material is captured and presented on the Internet at an unsurpassed level of quality. Equally important, this is done at almost no incremental cost to an audience limited in scope only by the confines of the World Wide Web (WWW).

Early pilot studies of the use of this capture software have included a university course and the archiving and dissemination of lectures in the prestigious CERN Student Summer Lecture Series. The pilot archive can be seen by visiting the following site: http://webcast.cern.ch/Projects/WebLectureArchive/index.html . Also archived at this same site are presentations by authoritative instructors in Object Oriented software. This was done in connection with our interest in evaluating the application for possible use in large-scale software training activities such as will be required in the upcoming Object Oriented and C++ training programs for the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN.

We believe, on the basis of these early studies, that the capture software is of sufficient robustness and quality, even when used in less than ideal capture environments, that it should be aggressively developed and put into full-scale operation to meet the demand for asynchronous software training. This will be of significant benefit for the US ATLAS training program. The funding we are seeking herein is for the specific development of a series of lectures on GEANT4, to be presented by Andrea dell'Acqua.

Goals

We will use Clipboard 2000, the latest QuickTime based capture software under development, in a targeted application in the overall ATLAS Experiment software training program, for the purpose of providing an immediate service, and for planning a continued future deployment. Activities include:

set up of equipment and software for the lecture archiving project;
training the presenter, A. dell'Acqua, in the use of Clipboard for lecture capture;
development of a training website which is associated with documentation necessary to complete the course;
evaluation of the usefulness of the capture software for web-based training programs.