During the early days of Michigan’s Stay Home-Stay Safe order, educators across LSA struggled to quickly find ways to complete their teaching objectives. All areas of LSA Technology Services were focused on providing the solutions needed to complete the in-flight classes under extraordinary circumstances. The Research Computing Services Team in LSA Technology Services found ways to help a Film, Television, and Media class and an Earth and Environmental Sciences class meet their learning objectives using solutions typically used to solve research problems.
Film, Television, and Media
Professors Markus Nornes and Chris McNamara from the Department of Film, Television, and Media reached out to LSA Technology Services requesting a data transfer solution for their documentary film class (FTVM 401). The students of this class worked in groups to produce documentary films and were unable to share and view them because the solutions being used to exchange the large amounts of video and audio data (1.5TB) on campus were either not sustainable remotely, or were slow and prone to failure. John Thiels from the LSA Technology Services Research Team worked with the professors on a solution that used a combination of existing research specific and generic solutions. The research storage solution, Turbo Storage, was used as a high speed/high capacity data store. Eduroam Wifi was used to provide students with access to high-speed wireless from nearby academic campuses worldwide for those students that did not have strong high-speed internet service at home. Globus Connect Personal Endpoint was used on student computers to ensure the transfer of the large files was reliable and hassle-free, even over unreliable connections. Thiels provided a great deal of support to both professors and to the students in order to protect the teaching and learning goals of this collaborative filmmaking work.
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Professor Nathan Niemi's "Intro to Geographic Information Systems (GIS)" course (EARTH 408) traditionally used a physical room of workstations capable of running GIS software for class and assignments. While our software licensing agreement allows for the installation of the software on personal devices for university-related work, not all of the students have computers meeting the minimum system requirements. When the department moved to virtual learning, the ITS Virtual Sites solution proved inadequate for some of the GIS tasks required. Professor Niemi reached out to Peter Knoop from the LSA Technology Services Research Team for help. Knoop used Amazon Web Services (AWS) AppStream to provide the students with remote access to the software from any computer. AppStream is an application streaming service that enables remote delivery of applications to users. AppStream access can be integrated with U-M Single Sign-On, and also provides persistent home folders, which was crucial for sharing GIS data sets and preserving student work when a poor home network temporarily interrupted a student’s session. There is a cost to AppStream, but Professor Niemi found it worth the price to provide his students with reliable and ubiquitous access to the specialized software his class requires.
