Teaching Supercomputers

Abstract

The paper presents results of semantic search analysis of the key educational concepts and their conceptual relations presented in the course “Supercomputers I and II” taught at the School of Media, Arts and Technology at the Solent Southampton University during the 2015–2019 academic years. The study uses Big Data Analytics approaches to extract the domain key concepts and to outline their pedagogical interconnections which reflect the structure of course lectures, so to teach ‘supercomputers’ as an university subject with its specificity and to allow students to acquire that knowledge comprehensively by having the insight of its key concepts as well as of its practical applications. The study uses the Sketch Engine software’s statistical approaches, so to extract the key terms (related to the key concepts in the field) from the course texts lectures and to compare their semantic content with that produced by the students (feedback) in the related courses taught at some other universities in UK. It, also, outlines the importance of the ‘activity-based learning approach’ used for supporting the teaching process, so to improve the acquired knowledge by the use of Solent Online Learning system allowing interactive and distant web-based learning.