In this paper we present an innovative prototype Open Source Teaching/Learning Collaboratory created at UC Merced that will provide the foundation for offering the vast majority of our Computer Science and Engineer- ing (CSE) courses, as well as courses from across our engi- neering disciplines, and, increasingly, computer courses and computer intensive courses throughout our university. This prototype facility is in operation at the present time, with one and possibly two additional Collaboratories to be installed in time for our Fall 2007 session. In addition, this facility will provide the model and framework for other local and dis- tance teaching activities planned for supporting curriculum development and computing training. We show that by rely- ing on free open source software and commodity hardware we can build an education computing environment that min- imizes administration tasks, provides effortless remote inter- action, simplifies and enhances the computer science curric- ula that can be delivered to the students and minimizes both the aquisition and operation costs.
['Jeff R. Wright', 'Stefano Carpin', 'Alberto E. Cerpa', 'German Gavilan', 'Marcelo Kallmann', 'Cameron Laird', 'Kyler Laird', 'Shawn D. Newsam', 'David C. Noelle']
Collaboratory: An Open Source Teaching and Learning Facility for Computer Science and Engineering Education