In this episode, Tyra Peirce speaks with Dr. Gisella Bassani, Associate Professor of Information Systems at University of Colorado Denver about her use of the Oracle Academy Cloud Program for teaching and learning, and how she gets her students started using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

 

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Episode Transcript:

 

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;34;20

Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce.

 

00;00;34;22 - 00;00;59;27

I'm your host here appears in this episode. I'm joined by Dr. Gisella Bassani, assistant teaching professor of information systems at University of Colorado, Denver, about her use of the Oracle Academy Cloud program in her classroom and some of the things she does to get her students started using Oracle Cloud infrastructure. Welcome, Dr. Barzani Thank you so much for having me, Tyra.

 

00;01;00;02 - 00;01;31;09

To start off, can you please give me a bit about your background and the class you teach? I am a information systems professional. I have been working in information systems for over 30 years. And much of the time I was implementing business intelligence systems, working on databases and reporting. About 13 years ago, I decided to switch to academia so that I could pass on my knowledge to the younger generation.

 

00;01;31;11 - 00;01;59;22

And I've been teaching at universities ever since. Both at BYU and now at Sea Denver. I teach multiple classes, both for graduate and undergraduate. My main focus is databases. Although I do teach everything from business classes and intro to business classes all the way to Excel and Tableau. But my happiness and the thing that I enjoy doing the most is teaching database classes.

 

00;01;59;24 - 00;02;22;28

How does the cloud environment make it easier for your database students? Did the cloud makes it easier for my database students for multiple reasons. The main one is that many of my students do not have a lot of space on their laptops to run the programs. Many of their laptops barely have enough space for the things that they need to have for other classes.

 

00;02;23;00 - 00;03;05;00

So this allows them to have a big database and use the software and without any problems. The second reason is because they can use both PC and MAC and different operating systems. So Linux, iOS and Windows all work with the database being in the cloud, and that makes life much, much easier. They also each have their own databases to work with, and I don't have to create an environment in my job at my school to host all of these databases.

 

00;03;05;07 - 00;03;27;05

So it makes it a lot easier for me, also for maintenance, not just for the students. On the flip side, are there things that make it a bit trickier for your students? Yeah. So there are a couple of things that do create some trickiness. First of all, the cloud database starts every seven days that you are not using it.

 

00;03;27;06 - 00;03;50;14

So if they go on a break or for some reason they're not focused on your class for about a week and then come back, they have to go in to the Oracle Cloud and actually physically restart the database rather than from the sequel developer on their computer. So that is a bit tricky. They get very flustered with that.

 

00;03;50;14 - 00;04;19;14

You have to have instructions for them to get through that. Additionally, every semester there seems to be one or two students that once they restart their database, the database does not fully restart correctly. So what happens is that it starts and then every 10 minutes it goes back to the services being stopped and they cannot restart it and keep it on for a long time.

 

00;04;19;17 - 00;04;45;03

So this seems to be an issue that has not yet found a resolution and it could be linked to creating a database is always free. So you may want to have them delete the database and recreate it, and that might help the student if they do it. Just slightly different with the not always free version checked and the third thing is really understanding the architecture.

 

00;04;45;05 - 00;05;10;18

They are not very intuitive about client server or cloud software architecture. Sometimes they think it's just all on their computer. And so sometimes you have to just explain that to them a little bit better about what be having something in the cloud means and how their actual computer software is different than the cloud software. I actually like that.

 

00;05;10;18 - 00;05;37;17

And honestly, I think it's really interesting because we don't they don't understand. A lot of times students are particular that it is different for client server and cloud. Like they don't understand that the software is not living on their machine. The software, the software will probably have the same feature functions, but it will be a little bit different in terms of access points, storage and when they're saving things and things along those lines.

 

00;05;37;17 - 00;05;57;25

So I think that's another thing that's interesting for them to learn. Also, they can access it from any computer, so they could be on a lab computer one minute or their computer at home the next, and they're still going to be able to have access to their to their database or their OCI in the cloud. Exactly. And this doesn't just happen with Oracle Software.

 

00;05;57;25 - 00;06;27;06

It's any cloud. Like when they're using the OneDrive, it takes them a very long time when they're freshmen to then understand how the OneDrive sort of works a little bit, you know, compared to having it on their computer. And yeah, it's just a little different. So what are some tips you have for faculty teaching database using OCI that will help their classroom run more smoothly?

 

00;06;27;08 - 00;06;54;00

Well, that's a great question. So there's quite a few things that you can do to make the classroom run more smoothly. The first thing is make sure that the students know to go in once a week, at least to keep the database operational. So that's number one. The next thing that you should really do is make sure that all of this information is also on your learning management system.

 

00;06;54;03 - 00;07;25;28

So you should create some videos