2026-03-10 –, Main Hall
This Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session is for GOOD attendees interested in Open OnDemand (OOD) for instructional use. With rising demand for centralized computing in education, OOD’s web interface helps instructors and students access high-end resources easily. The BoF will feature presentations on OOD customizations for teaching, interactive demos, and Q&A, fostering community discussion and sharing of adaptable solutions. Attendees will connect with peers and learn techniques for classroom and broader OOD use.
Invited Speakers:
- Martin Cuma [University of Utah]
- Sean Anderson [Wake Forest University]
This Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session is for GOOD attendees who are responsible for or interested in Open OnDemand deployments and applications for instructional use cases.
At colleges and universities across the country, AI and Data Analytics initiatives, budget constraints, and hybrid and virtual instruction modalities are increasing the demand for access to centralized computing resources for instruction. At the same time, there is an increase in the breadth of disciplines employing these technologies and a growing range of computing experience among both instructors and students in the classroom. The Open OnDemand platform is well suited to supporting this growth. Its familiar web interface reduces the learning curve of using high-end, Linux based servers so that instructors can quickly prepare their experiential assignments, quickly orient students to the platform, and focus class time on course content instead of detailed computing instructions. This BoF aims to facilitate discussion on OOD solutions for the classroom use case and bring together the community of research computing and education technology professionals supporting instructor and student use of OOD in the classroom.
The BoF will consist of a series of presentations on OOD customizations, apps or other extensions for instructional use that community members have developed and used at their institution. Each presentation will include an interactive demonstration of the feature or app, a discussion of the design and implementation of the feature or app and a pointer to any corresponding software and documentation. Each presentation will be followed by Q&A, where attendees will be encouraged to ask technical questions as needed to understand whether the same could be made available at their site and what changes might be needed to do so. We will do our best to identify examples that can be adopted broadly with corresponding speakers involved in the implementation that can address questions at sufficient depth.
BoF attendees will learn about the three capabilities presented by our speakers and will have the opportunity to interact with the speakers during the BoF and throughout GOOD’26 if they have additional questions. They will meet colleagues from other organizations with the shared interest of supporting instructional use of OOD. Lastly, they will be exposed to techniques for customizing OOD that are likely applicable beyond the classroom use case.
