Academic and Research Computing Services: A New Name for ETS

We are thrilled to announce our new group name, Academic and Research Computing Services or ARCS for short. Our new name reflects the expanded services that we now offer to the HMC community. This includes more support for research computing, as well as instructional design services. The arrival of our new instructional designer, Dr. Yi Luo, and our new Research Computing Intern, Chu Oguejiofor, makes this a good time to introduce our new group name. Academic and Research Computing Services (ARCS), will be used in all of our communications with the community starting today.

You can read more about Yi and Chu in these separate news articles:

• CIS Welcomes Dr. Yi Luo in the Instructional Designer Position
• CIS Welcomes Chu Oguejiofor in the Research Computing Internship Position

In connection with our new name, we’re also happy to announce our new website at http://www.hmc.edu/cis/cis-arcs/. Our new website describes the services that we offer with examples of pilots and projects that we’ve worked on with faculty, staff and students. Please take a look and send us your feedback.

The services ARCS offers are:

• Projects: The Academic and Research Computing team sends out a request for educational technology projects three times a year. Our goal is to work with groups across campus to expand the use of educational technology and instructional design throughout the college.
• Pilots: The Academic and Research Computing Services (ARCS) team regularly performs trials of new technology in “real world” situations within HMC. By this we typically select a few faculty members to test out new technology in their course, and then ask for feedback about how it worked for them. We then investigate the practicality of implementing that new technology either across campus, or for select courses/classrooms.
• Instructional Design: Instructional Design is the process of developing learning experiences and course content. It’s a sort of “learning engineering,” using research, technology, and design thinking to build effective learning experiences.
• Research Computing: Academic and Research Computing Services (ARCS) provides research computing services including high-performance computing (HPC), high-throughput computing (HTC), data intensive computing, Big Data analytics, large scale data storage resources, and other advanced digital services related to research activities.