SPIN Program Introduces Shelana Martin to Cybersecurity and Moodle

How did Shelana Martin, who’s not a computer science major, end up in an National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) internship? The senior in education technology, under the College of Education’s Learning and Education Studies program, was part of NCSA’s SPIN (Students Pushing Innovation) internship program.

SPIN fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, encouraging Illinois undergraduate students, and not just computer science students, to do challenging research related to cutting-edge new technology. The new technology Martin learned was Moodle, an open-source learning management system. She also learned quite a bit about cybersecurity, too.

For Martin, who has a background in astronomy, a minor in informatics, and is majoring in education technology, the SPIN project retrofitting cybersecurity facts into an engaging educational technology format was a perfect fit. “The project kind of encompasses all three,” she says regarding its alignment to her various studies.

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