Summer Working Connections Moving Online

For the first time ever, you won’t have to travel to the blazing hot July plains of North Texas to attend Summer Working Connections.

In light of the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis, the National Convergence Technology Center (CTC) has decided to convert Summer Working Connections into an all-online event.  IT faculty are welcome to join us July 13-17, 2020 in what will be the 19th Texas edition of this important professional development event.   Last summer we welcomed 104 attendees to Working Connections.  It will be interesting to see how attendance to the online version compares.

Since the very first Summer Working Connections held at Dallas’ Richland College in 2002, more than 2100 enrollments have been recorded covering more than 90 unique IT topics. In the past three years, an average of 75 percent of the faculty attendees chose a discipline that they were not currently teaching, leading to 32 new degrees, certificates, or courses created and implemented using the training provided. By the National CTC’s calculations, over 143,000 students and faculty have been impacted by the training provided by Summer Working Connections since the program began.

This year, we’re featuring the following seven tracks:

• “AWS Academy Cloud Architecting” will cover the fundamentals of building IT infrastructure on AWS. The course is designed to teach solutions architects how to optimize their use of the AWS Cloud by understanding AWS services and how they fit into cloud-based solutions. This is a follow-up to last summer’s popular “AWS Cloud Foundations” track.
• “Cybersecurity Infrastructure Configuration (CIC)” and “Cybersecurity Prevention & Countermeasures (CPC)” will be offered by Palo Alto Networks. This track provides information for how to install, configure, and manage firewalls for defense of enterprise network architecture.
• “Hybrid App Development” will focus on React Native, a framework developed by Facebook, leverages widely available skillsets (ie. HTML, CSS, Javascript) to develop full-fledged native mobile applications. A single codebase can produce both Android and iOS mobile apps which accelerate development while eliminating the need for platform-specific resources.
• “Introduction to Microsoft Azure” will immerse attendees in the fundamentals and best practices of Microsoft Azure cloud deployments. This will include discussions of the principle of infrastructure-as-code and how to successfully deploy resources in Azure.
• “Programming Essentials in Python” will cover how to design, write, debug, and run programs encoded in the Python language. As blog readers likely already know, Python is a general-purpose programming language used to build just about anything. It’s key for backend web development, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and scientific computing.
• “vSphere 6.7 Fast Track” will cover content from both the “Install, Configure and Manage” and the “Optimize and Scale” courses. This intensive course takes you from introductory to advanced VMware vSphere management skills, including learning the advanced skills needed to manage and maintain a highly available and scalable virtual infrastructure.
• “Wireshark: Protocols, Troubleshooting, and Network Forensics” will look at the world’s most widely-used network protocol analyzer that provides details on a network at a microscopic level and is the de facto standard across many commercial and non-profit enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions.

If you’re a current community college IT/convergence faculty and would like to be invited, please write to nationalctc@collin.edu.