A Curriculum Development Project for IBM Linux in Academia Program

This paper introduces the IBM Linux in Academia program and a curriculum development project initiated by the authors for the program. The service of IBM Linux in Academia program is based on the Linux virtual service concept in which a mainframe computer is partitioned into many Linux images supported by IBM’s Virtual Machine Operating System. On the IBM S/390 system, each image acts as an independent Linux server. This free service saves the acquisition and management cost of running multiple physically separated servers for participating universities. The curriculum development project intends to create and share curriculum materials for e-Business related courses among participants. The main IBM software used in this project includes DB2 Universal Database and WebSphere. The main objective in the first stage of this project is to develop a data warehouse generator to manipulate a large read-only database obtained from a real world health care application supplied by IBM. Through a web based user interface, an instructor could flexibly create a data warehouse using the Account Data Model developed by some of the authors from the read-only database with the desirable size and attributes to support pedagogical needs. Other aspects of the project are also addressed