Abstract
While multi-core platforms are now ubiquitous in all areas of information technology, from enterprise software engineering to mobile app development, parallel computing education is still lagging behind the demand for skilled parallel programmers. At many universities today, parallel and concurrent computing is still not part of the core curriculum because of resistance to major curriculum changes. Many other universities lack the necessary educators or infrastructure to teach a comprehensive parallel computing course. Furthermore, even addressing these issues would do nothing towards supporting software professionals who have already entered the work force and have no plans to return to school. To address this broad need for a standalone, publically available, comprehensive, and easily accessible course on parallel computing, we have developed an online offering packaged as a Coursera Specialization on Parallel, Concurrent, and Distributing Computing in Java. In this paper, we describe the preparations for this online course and the unique challenges we encountered in terms of both curriculum development and technical infrastructure. We describe how lessons learned from an on-campus parallelism course at Rice University helped to shape the Coursera specialization, and summarize our experience with implementing this specialization on the Coursera platform at scale.
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