2018 Provost’s Learning Innovations Grants 2018 PROVOST’S LEARNING INNOVATIONS ... · 2018-03-20 · 2018 Provost’s Learning Innovations Grants 1 2018 PROVOST’S LEARNING INNOVATIONS

2018 Provost’s Learning Innovations Grants

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2018 PROVOST’S LEARNING INNOVATIONS GRANTS

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS

1. Complete this Application Form, in its entirety, and save as “Lastname_Firstname_APP” (using your name).

2. Complete the Budget Worksheet and save as “Lastname_Firstname_BUDGET” (using your name).

3. Ask your Department Head to complete the Department Head Certification, scan and save as, “Lastname_Firstname_SIG” (using your name).

4. Email all documents to [email protected], no later than 11:59pm EST, January 22, 2018.

If you have any questions about completing this application, please contact Michael Starenko at 585-475-5035 or [email protected].

APPLICANT INFORMATION

This application is for a (please select one type of grant):

Exploration Grant

X Focus Grant - Active Learning

Focus Grant - Applied Critical Thinking

Principal Applicant name: Bruce Hartpence

Faculty title: professor Email: [email protected] Phone: x57938 (Full-time only)

College: GCCIS Department: IST

Department Head name: Steve Zilora Email: [email protected]

Others involved in the project (if any): Minseok Kwon Project name: Applying Active Learning to new courses on Software Based Networking

Total funds requested (as calculated on the budget worksheet): $5000 (requests of $1,000 to $5,000 will be considered)

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BUDGET

There is a fillable PDF worksheet to calculate your budget. You can download the worksheet at rit.edu/ili/plig.

• The total shown on this worksheet must match the “Total funds requested” in the Applicant Information section of this application form

• If awarded, additional funds will be provided to cover any benefits and ITS expenses associated with the salary budget requested

• Note that any equipment or other materials purchased with grant funds are the property of your department and revert to the department after your project is completed

TIMELINE AND TASKS

Please indicate any variances to the planned PLIG 2018 schedule and your reasons. If you do not intend to deviate from the schedule, you may leave this section blank. Note: the tasks are described in the Dissemination Agreement section.

Task Date Proposed Variance and Reason

Full project plan submitted to TLS August 24, 2018

Preliminary findings submitted to TLS January 11,

2019

Summary of final findings submitted to TLS

August 23, 2019

Final budget accounting submitted TLS August 23, 2019

Participation in ILI/TLS PLIG dissemination event (e.g., PLIG Showcase)

November 2019

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STATEMENT OF UTILITY (two pages maximum)

Using the evaluation criteria outlined in the Proposal Evaluation section of the PLIG website, please provide an overview of the project you are proposing, including:

• Project objectives

• An explanation of the teaching/learning problem(s) it is designed to address

• An explanation of the significance of the project to student outcomes and/or the student experience.

• A brief description of how the project integrates with activity already underway at RIT in a priority area and/or

how this approach has been successfully used at RIT already.

Teaching/Learning Problem: The shift to cloud computing requires a curricular response. This includes the software/hardware, methodology, architectures and the skills needed to understand them. In addition, as instructors of lab based courses, we note that many computing/communication classes suffer from a disconnect problem in which the lecture material is separated in time from the lab experience. It is often the case that material must be partially reviewed during the exercises. Lastly, students do not often have the option to have a cross-discipline experience.

Objectives: This proposal seeks to accomplish two things:

• First, we propose to develop a pair of courses to be taken by CS and IST students that will direct them

down a path increasing their understanding and capability on switching, data center (cloud)

technologies including virtualization, data center networking and open source software technologies.

The courses will introduce them to various open source projects and get them involved in performance

enhancement techniques. Students will have the option to participate in one or both. Upon completion,

students will be prepared for advanced projects that can contribute to the community. One course will

be in the IST department, the other in CS.

• Second, we propose a modification to the techniques used to teach the current curriculum to utilize a

greater amount of teamwork and active learning techniques. Our current networking coursework

follows a lecture/lab model in which the students attend lecture to learn concepts or protocols and then

move to the lab to build experimental topologies. This separation in time creates a situation requiring

review or duplicate coverage. Compounding this is the virtual nature of “cloud” content that can make

concepts more difficult to grasp. Students often need additional instruction or lab time to fully

understand what they are doing. So a new structure for classes is appropriate. The goal is to ensure

that students learn as they work.

Course 1: Introduction to Switch Architectures The goal of this course is to provide students with an understanding of standard networking architectures and capabilities. Everything is to be built using software or datacenter models as opposed to hardware. These activities will build their knowledge of switch operation as well as an understanding of performance goals and weaknesses of currently deployed devices. This course will also have the goal of introducing the students to open source projects that can replace more traditional hardware via network functions virtualization or NFV. This will include a variety of approaches and relationships such as those seen in OVS, DPDK, VPP and FD.io. The latter will occur in a cloud-based virtualization environment. The topics will include:

• standard L2 and L3 architectures and protocols

• virtual (NFV, ONF) and software-based networking (Open vSwitch, VPP/FD.io, and DPDK)

• open source projects (OpenCompute, Opennetworking)

For labs and projects the students will build small physical networks and convert them into virtual networks using required tools. The course has the following intended learning outcomes:

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STATEMENT OF UTILITY (continued)

1. Explain the structure, operation and functions of layer 2 and 3 networking devices.

2. Explain the movement to software networking.

3. Describe the issues associated with software based networking and the major industry projects.

4. Demonstrate ability to construct small scale hardware and software based networks.

Course 2: Developing a Programmable Switch and Enhancing Its Performance This course will introduce the students to the concepts and practices of programmable network switches and will teach techniques to enhance their performance. Programmable switches are vital in enabling SDN and technologies such as cloud services, IoT, and big data. They provide an open architecture that is dynamically configurable and programmable at low cost and good performance. Despite this, the typical computing curriculum falls short of courses that teach the concepts of programmable switches, let alone their practice and performance enhancing techniques. The students will be exposed to the architecture of programmable switches, system testing, and how to design modular and extensible switches. The students will also learn various performance enhancing techniques like loop unrolling and vector packet processing as well as cache management and algorithms for packet processing. The detailed topics covered in the course are:

• Concepts and modular design of programmable switches, e.g., VPP and VPP plug-ins

• performance enhancing techniques, performance comparison and cache utilization

• algorithms for IP lookup and packet forwarding, e.g., tries and filter-based techniques

• hardware issues and compiler optimization

The students will apply critical thinking to the challenges faced, and have opportunities to come up with their own enhanced solutions. The students will have hands-on experience on these topics via labs and projects. The course has several anticipated learning outcomes.

1. Explain general architectures for programmable switches, the important issues, hardware

techniques used for programmable switches, and their implications

2. Install, modify, test a programmable switch (e.g., VPP), and improve its performance

3. Control and analyze cache utilization

4. Design packet processing algorithms, implement them in a programmable switch, and compare their

performance

5. Write a program for a programmable switch, and enhance the performance via compiler

optimization techniques.

Significance: A review of our current coursework reveals that while networking and cloud computing are covered, students do not get an opportunity to work and experiment with the technologies to any great depth. What is more, we often depend on vendor network equipment and hardware as opposed to open source projects and software elements. In order to give students the tools and skills necessary to compete and thrive in the current environment, this addition and approach are important for students interested in these areas. Lastly, student will work in a cross-discipline environment.

Integration/Use at RIT: For class operation we would like to adopt an active learning model in which the students work in small groups to solve problems. Students will be encouraged to apply problem solving methodologies both prior to attempting tasks and during their execution. In this way students will reinforce each other’s learning while guided by the instructor. Lecture will be integrated into the lab setting and in smaller learning “chunks” so that the students will be able to immediately implement what they have been taught or shown. Active learning has been a part of many successful projects at RIT including early efforts by Keith Whittington. More recently the work of Roberta Klein, Rob Garrick and Liz Lawley show that deeper student involvement in teaching and problem solving can be very beneficial. It is our intent that these classes will enhance current programs and may replace existing courses.

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STATEMENT OF CREATIVITY (three paragraphs maximum)

Provide a brief description of how this is a novel approach, or a new application of an existing mode or model of teaching and learning, and/or research about how teaching and learning represents a new paradigm. (Please note that special consideration will be given to proposals that demonstrate a new use/application of a model, system, or technology already in use at RIT.)

There are three elements of creativity in this proposal.

The first is that a full active learning approach has not been applied to our networking classes. It has been worked into some programming classes and some other areas, but not networking. The goal is to allow work in small groups and to facilitate students helping and teaching each other. This is in addition to the direction given by the instructor. This will also have tighter integration into the lab setting. The whole idea of trying to get students to think more deeply about what they are doing and why – to read/write/discuss, is a structure that fits very well with the content of both courses.

The second creative element is that a predominately hardware and proprietary software based classes will be moving to cloud based solutions. We will be converting a hardware based class to one that is entirely online and based in software. These classes will also be using open source software for the network elements and programming. These elements include firewalls, routers, switches, etc. A class offered in this fashion may also be able to be converted to an online environment which is very unusual for a class dependent on hardware. This may lead the way for other classes with similar dependencies to be offered online or with resources that do not require as much space and power. For students, classes of this sort require a different level of thinking because you cannot see a device to determine its status or follow the cabling. This is actually a monumental change as hardware based courses are very difficult to extend to online learning models. We are also very used to dealing with vendors such as Cisco, Juniper and Microsoft. But today we see a huge increase in the use of open source software in the form of distributions (Linux), projects and complete architectures. This project will incorporate as many of these items as possible giving the students the tools and understanding necessary to succeed in this changing environment.

The third element is that we are working to create some cross-disciplinary work in that students will be moving between two departments as they develop their skill and understanding. It is often the case that student desire to supplement their education with classes from another department. With these classes, they will be able to experience several facets of their chosen field and directly apply them to their own work.

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STATEMENT OF EFFICACY (two pages maximum)

Provide a brief description of the experiment/research design, methodology, and methods of data collection you will use to gauge efficacy.

An important question is whether or not an approach like this will work. Factors affecting the outcome include the investigators having some experience with software based network elements and topics such as data centers, successful deployment of the model at RIT and that students could be shown to have some level of success in achieving learning outcomes. In turns out that we have all three at RIT. Several local projects or courses provide evidence that this project has a high probability of success. The first is our virtualization course.

NSSA 244 Virtualization – this course has run for several semesters and takes students though the networking, storage and virtual infrastructure necessary to run a small data center. The culmination of this class is that the students, working in pairs, put all of the pieces together themselves until they have a working topology. The class shows that an entire section can be taught about and deploy the architecture required for this project.

Working with GENI – GENI is an online resource that allows researchers to build and experiment with a large variety of network topologies using open source tools and distributions. When using GENI students do not have access to physical hardware of any kind and this is the exact model we intend to use for the new curriculum. GENI has been integrated into classes here at RIT and this was successful enough to warrant a presentation at a GENI conference.

SDN seminar – this was a test course that was designed to cover the emerging area of software defined networking. SDN does not make much use of hardware and is run in a virtual infrastructure of some kind. In the last portion of the class, we used GENI to accomplish similar tasks in the cloud.

Cisco LACF – RIT and Cisco have already begun working together on a project that attempts to improve the forwarding through a software defined switch/router. This was a project that Professors Kwon and Hartpence completed for Cisco. The idea was to take a locally developed routing algorithm and run it against other routing algorithms. Cisco supported the project with both hardware and funding. The project was completed successfully.

Based on this experience our approach will follow a set of general steps: 1. Students receive links to online activities, necessary material, assignments or videos. This material

will include either a series of questions or a preview of a discussion/quiz.

2. Students come prepared to discuss a problem or advance the discussion in class/lab. We will use

this to work through experiments as well.

3. The classes convene in the lab and built the experiment topologies or work on their programmable

switches.

4. Evaluation will be through verbal/written examinations or demonstrations covering their builds. Small

group discussion can be a good gauge of student understanding and so a combination of techniques

will be used.

5. For feedback, both the materials used and the quizzes/discussions will be evaluated by the entire

class. The expectation is that good (not just popular) active learning classroom techniques will

emerge as will the challenging topics that need more coverage.

Measurement: We have several opportunities to measure the success of the project:

• Simply completing the experiments and the examinations provides evidence that the students

achieved objectives.

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STATEMENT OF EFFICACY (continued)

• We also hope to determine the efficacy of the active learning approach by surveying students and

comparing their results to similar classes. We will compare their experiences with those of the

students who do not take this course to understand the impact of this course more clearly.

• We can also leverage our reviewers from the previous Cisco project regarding the effectiveness,

usefulness, and feasibility of the course materials that we develop including lab setup and

assignments. We will address concerns raised by the reviewers, and upgrade our facility as well as

course materials accordingly.

While the shift in this direction will be challenging, the silver lining is that we have most of the resources necessary to support the new coursework. Both our current coursework in virtualization and RITs Remote Laboratory Emulation System (RLES) would, with only slight modification, be able to run the intended experiments. In addition, we have experience using the NSF funded Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI).

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DISSEMINATION PLAN (optional)

Provide details about the journals, conferences, shows, or other external vehicles with strong potential for dissemination of your results. Include supporting documentation, such as preliminary interest or acceptance, with your application, if available. (Please note that special consideration will be given to proposals that have a defined opportunity for external dissemination, such as an academic journal or professional conference.)

ILI/TLS will assist with arranging channels for disseminating results within RIT (e.g., annual PLIG Showcase).

We have several opportunities to inform the community and share our ideas.

We will disseminate the idea of the course, the materials that we develop, and our findings on student learning to others who are interested. Some examples include:

• Education conferences such as SIGITE, SIGCSE and CCSCNE

• Technical venues such as GENI conferences and the Cisco PI summit

• Social media. For example we have a successful youtube channel with more than 100 videos

• Locally we have the PLIG Showcase and the potential for a bootcamp for interested faculty, GAs,

TAs and RAs

Packaging for other schools or Online Offerings

But there may be other impactful prospects for a project such as this. Many schools lack either the expertise or equipment necessary to develop coursework (or courseware) of this type. As a result, many programs rely on lecture only. As we know, this model does not do as much to prepare students for employment or reinforce the material studied when the content is highly technical. If this project could be packaged for general consumption then it becomes very attractive as a pilot that can be built upon. It could even be moved online. What is every bit as exciting as the new architectures and active learning models applied to this setting is that there are external funding tracks for this type of activity. The NSF has had several solicitations directed at partnerships between schools and moving the current workforce forward.

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ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS Please address these questions, if needed.

Will your project require assistance for extensive or unusual media, multimedia, simulation, and/or software development? If so, please explain?

All courses offered by RIT must be accessible to students with disabilities, according to Section 504 of the

Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

(rit.edu/studentaffairs/disabilityservices/info). Is your proposed teaching approach accessible to all students, with

reasonable accommodation? If not, please explain.

RIT abides by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), which prohibits instructors from

making students' identities, course work, and educational records public without their consent

(rit.edu/xVzNE). Will any data gathering or sharing for your project raise any FERPA issues? If so, please explain.

None

The project will be accessible to all students.

This project does not have any FERPA issues.

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DISSEMINATION AGREEMENT

By completing this grant application, I agree to provide the materials described here, in support of disseminating what is learned from this project to other faculty at RIT.

I also agree to return all/a portion of the funds that I receive for this project to RIT if I fail to complete or provide the materials described here.

• Full project plan (including roles and responsibilities, milestone dates, and pertinent project details)

• Overview of preliminary findings (may include experiment/study design, lessons learned, initial data

collection, and/or literature review summary)

• Final summary of findings (including data collection, lessons learned, implications for further study, and which

may be in the form of an article abstract, conference presentation outline, or short report)

• Final budget accounting (reconciliation of budget provided with your application and the actual project

expenses)

• Participation in an ILI/TLS dissemination event (e.g., present a poster or other display at the PLIG Showcase)

By submitting this application, I accept this agreement. _BH_MK_ (applicant, please initial here)

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DEPARTMENT HEAD CERTIFICATION

I support this PLIG application and budget, and verify that the principal applicant is a full-time faculty member in good standing in my department.

Principal Applicant name: ____Bruce Hartpence__________________________________________________

Department Head Name (PRINT): __Steve Zilora_________________________ Email: [email protected]__

Department Head Signature: ___________________________________________ Date: _______________

NOTE: When signed, please scan and email with your Application Form to: [email protected]