Canvas Helps Teachers Facilitate Computer Programming Activities for National Hour of Code Week through Collaboration with Vocareum and ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 28, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Canvas by Instructure (NYSE: INST), the open learning management system (LMS) that makes teaching and learning easier, has collaborated with Vocareum and the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University to offer a free course in support of Hour of Code. The course will help teachers prepare to teach an hour of code in their classrooms, providing the tools and confidence they need to introduce their students to coding.

“We want to empower teachers with the resources they need to provide an introduction to coding in their classrooms,” said Tara Gunther, Vice President of Partnerships at Instructure. “Our hope is that teachers who take this free course will feel more at ease when introducing coding to their students, and will participate in one of the many activities offered by the Hour of Code organization during the 2018 Computer Science Education Week, December 3-9.”

With Vocareum closely integrated with Canvas, teachers have access to virtual computer science labs to support coursework in data science, programming, robotics, and more—all without ever having to leave their Canvas environment. The content for the course has been provided by Phillip Miller and Dr. Ryan Meuth Lecturers in the Fulton Schools.

“Learning to program unlocks the full power of the mechanics we use every day,” said Dr. Ryan Meuth, Lecturer at Arizona State University, “We think that if teachers learn to program and see the potential, they’ll want to share the experience with their students.”

The free, online, self-directed course prepares teachers to facilitate computer programming activities in their classroom by introducing the basics of computer programming and computer science pedagogy. The course gives teachers computer science confidence through a hands-on introduction to programming using the Python language, no experience or extra software required. The course will be available on Canvas Network starting November 26, 2018. Teachers completing the course with a grade of 70 percent or better will be eligible for an 8-hour Professional Development Certificate issued by Arizona State University.

“Technology is rapidly transforming the global workforce,” said Sanjay Srivastava, CEO at Vocareum. “Helping our young people develop the skills they need in order to build technology will position them for success in whichever line of work they choose in the global economy of tomorrow.”

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The ‘Hour of Code™’ is a nationwide initiative by Computer Science Education Week  and Code.org to introduce millions of students to one hour of computer science and computer programming.

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Vocareum To Provide Classroom-Style Learning Environments For AWS Educate Members

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Vocareum, a leader in cloud learning labs, is pleased to announce a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver cloud-related labs to higher-education institutions, educators and students via AWS Educate Classrooms, and no credit card-required AWS Educate Starter Accounts.

Vocareum customers include top-tier universities that are looking to incorporate cloud-related learning opportunities in the classroom. The new collaboration provides streamlined and no-cost access to AWS Educate resources and services for projects, assignments and other classroom environments.  (Related: Introducing AWS Educate Classrooms | AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog)

With AWS Educate Classrooms, educators can set up their own AWS Educate virtual teaching space, request AWS credits, invite students, monitor usage and view activity. Templated classroom environments are provided through this new feature on topics such as Cloud Basics, AWS Cloud9, and Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. With their own AWS Educate Starter Accounts, students can request a simple, secure environment to explore cloud computing concepts, work on homework assignments, and learn how to use AWS, without needing a credit card.

“We are excited to launch the new AWS Educate Classrooms environment, responding to one of the highest requested features from our educators. This new feature allows an added level of collaboration between teachers and students through AWS Educate, and our work with Vocareum is helping AWS Educate provide the resources necessary for students around the world to develop the skills necessary to pursue a career in cloud computing,” said Ken Eisner, Global Lead, AWS Educate, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

“Our customers and partners rely on Vocareum to deliver relevant, cutting-edge tools and technologies as part of our cloud learning labs,” said Sanjay Srivastava, CEO, Vocareum.  “We are thrilled to be working with AWS Educate to make cloud computing resources and services more readily available and accessible to educators and students.”

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Vocareum Integration with edX.org platform enables Cloud Lab option for Massive Open Online Classes

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Vocareum, a pioneer in cloud-based learning labs, is pleased to announce the general availability of its integration with edX.org, the leading nonprofit online learning platform created by Harvard and MIT, to enable instructors to deliver more interactive and engaging content than ever before. The Vocareum cloud learning labs and auto-grading capabilities make it possible to administer coding assignment, perform assessment and deliver student feedback at scale and in real time across the over 2,000 online courses and programs offered on edX.org.

Having already been deployed across numerous partners within the edX educational consortium, the Vocareum solution on edX supports a broad range of courses, including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Software Development and more from prestigious schools, including Columbia University, The University of California, San Diego, The Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Pennsylvania.

“We see edX leading the way with more interactive and engaging content and are excited to be working with them and our school partners to provide the critical lab and assessment capabilities to make it a reality,” said Sanjay Srivastava, CEO of Vocareum.  “For Vocareum, this is a unique opportunity to demonstrate the robust nature of our offering.”

“We are excited to announce this new level of integration with Vocareum,” said Anant Agarwal, edX CEO and MIT professor. “Through our work together, we are able to offer learners, all over the world, with a more enriched, rigorous and personalized online learning experience with online labs and code graders. Our partnership marks an exciting step in furthering our joint missions of increasing access to high-quality education for all learners, everywhere.”

In January 2017, Georgia Tech launched its CS1301x: Introduction to Computing online class on edX.org, serving over 69,000 students to date. As David Joyner, the course’s designer and instructor, points out, “Our course material includes over 300 coding exercises delivered through the Vocareum cloud labs in edX. The reliability and customizability are high enough for us to use for hundreds of for-credit students at Georgia Tech, but the scalability and automated grading let us simultaneously deliver them to thousands of MOOC students around the world — and the experience embedded inside edX dramatically reduces the friction for both audiences.”

Columbia University’s CSMM.101x Artificial Intelligence course on edX.org has enrolled over 160,000 learners since it began in January 2017. “As part of Columbia’s MicroMasters program in Artificial Intelligence, this course provides rigorous, master-level coursework and requires learners to complete in-depth, hands-on programming assignments that were designed on the Vocareum platform,” said Dr. Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi, the course’s lecturer. “Vocareum’s seamless integration with edX and scalability has allowed the design team to provide graduate level programming assignments to thousands of learners globally.”

Key Features of Vocareum available on edX include: 

  • Single-Sign-On. Vocareum provides seamless integration through LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) and a single sign-on for edX users, with no need for a separate Vocareum login.
  • Consistent User Experience. edX users stay within the platform’s context, even when working on assignments served by the Vocareum cloud. Simple micro-assessments or programming exercises can occur directly in-line with the rest of the educational content;  more complex programming assignments or exams can launch in a new browser window.
  • Automated grading and reporting. With Vocareum’s automated grading capabilities, edX instructors can support massive enrollments and also deliver a much more engaging student experience with hands-on programming assignments and real-time assessment of student work.
  • Scalability. The Vocareum cloud lab is built for MOOC-scale and has already been deployed in sizeable edX computer and data science courses, handling millions of live student programming assignments.

Vocareum’s hands-on programming labs and real-time assessments, paired with edX’s platform and educational content, provide tomorrow’s computer and data scientist professionals with the knowledge and tools to create real-world solutions in emerging disciplines.

For more details about the Vocareum + edX solution, please visit https://www.vocareum.com/edx-partnership/

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VOCAREUM DEPLOYS ONLINE DATA SCIENCE LAB WITH NOTRE DAME

Exciting collaboration launches August 2017 to educate next generation of data scientists

SAN JOSE, CA. APRIL 25, 2017 /PR NEWSWIRE/ – In a global digital economy, the role of data in making mission-critical decisions is increasing exponentially, leading to greater demand for data scientists and college graduates with a background in analytics. To address this growing worldwide demand for talent, Vocareum, a leader in cloud-based labs for coding classes, announces the launch of an online lab with the University of Notre Dame to educate the next generation of data scientists and analysts. “We value this opportunity to work with Notre Dame to leverage cloud computing to deliver the tools that our data scientists will need to succeed in the future,” says Sanjay Srivastava, the CEO of Vocareum.

Vocareum’s cloud-based environment provides instructors with a user-friendly and pedagogically effective workbench for setting up and grading problems in development environments such as R-Studio and Jupyter Notebook, and in multiple languages, including R and Python. Instructors can set up auto-graded problems to provide students with immediate feedback, manually grade student assignments, and provide in-line comments on code.

Embedded within the curriculum for Notre Dame’s new online Master of Science in Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics: Data Science Specialization, Vocareum will be used for multiple aspects of student learning and assessments including: creating practice problems, hosting homework sets, recording grades in the Learning Management System (LMS), and communicating grades and feedback to students.

By using Vocareum, Notre Dame will be able to deploy its online classes much faster and more cost effectively — until recently, the big challenge in supporting such classes has been the cost and complexity of setting up labs and compute clusters to meet the need for an up-to-date range of programming languages and analytics tools. Student work, big data sets, computation and visualization environments all present additional administrative burdens. Now with Vocareum, Notre Dame faculty and graduate students get everything in one place.

“We need learning solutions that are current, easy to use, and scalable across a large number of technical disciplines. Vocareum really fits the bill,” says Elliott Visconsi, Chief Academic Digital Officer at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Steven Buechler, Faculty Director of Notre Dame’s new online data science graduate program, adds that “we were attracted to Vocareum because it offers an extensive set of utilities built on top of AWS, giving us the flexibility to configure a cost-effective computing hub for the diverse tools we’ll be teaching across our Data Science program.”

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