2026 Compute Ontario Summer School FAQ

With a few exceptions, all our courses are recorded. The recordings become available one hour after the end of the session. Each session has a separate recording. To access the recording, go to the course web page, scroll down to the session you need, then click on the Live session link with a blue circle with the letter b next to it. Now press the "Presentation" link in the "Playback" column.  To access the recordings, you need to be registered for the course. If the course you are interested in is full, you can contact us after the summer school (support@tech.alliancecan.ca) concerning access to the recordings and other course materials.

No. Any Canadian researcher can register for our summer school courses. This applies to Canadian grad students, some undergrads (involved in research), postdocs, staff researchers, faculty, librarian etc. You can be in a Canadian university, college, national lab etc. 

The vast majority of our courses do not have such a requirement. The courses which do require this list this as a formal course prerequisite. For the rest of the courses you can create a Compute Ontario Training account, then use it to register for the courses you want.

Go to the website, e.g., 

• https://training.computeontario.ca/courses

log in, and click on "My Calendar".

At the bottom of the calendar page, there is an "Import or export calendars" link, click it. On the page that comes up, click on the Export calendar button, choose the events that you want to export, and either click the "Get calendar URL" or "Export" button. (The export button will generate an iCal file and the URL button will have the same available via a URL.) Import such into your calendar tool.

NOTE: The live sessions, assignments, etc. in Summer School will appear in the calendar entries --not the courses themselves. (The links will be to the appropriate activity in the appropriate course.) If you want to see all of the courses you are in, after logging in to the site click on "My Courses" instead of "My Calendar".

You can have your computer show you transcription for anything in your web browser with certain web browsers such as Google Chrome, e.g.,

• If you are using the Chrome web browser, you can enable captions in the Chrome web browser on your computer/phone, e.g., see this link from Google. This has been supported in Chrome since 2021 and can be handy to use when transcriptions are not otherwise available. (It is accessed in Chrome via Settings Menu > Accessibility > Captions > Live Captions.)

ASIDE: While not directly relevant here, for person's presenting PowerPoint slides using PowerPoint to present such, know that PowerPoint also has a Live Transcription feature that may or may not be wanted, e.g., https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/present-with-real-time-automatic-captions-or-subtitles-in-powerpoint-68d20e49-aec3-456a-939d-34a79e8ddd5f . If you are presenting using PowerPoint and things suddenly are being transcribed by PowerPoint, knowing how to turn this off can be useful. In BigBlueButton the presenter can also save the slides as a a PDF and then upload them (Click the + icon at the bottom left when presenter > publish presentation and upload the file and then click the Confirm button) to share slides instead of using screen sharing in order to show slides to a class.

You don't need to do anything special - the system will record your attendance automatically.

To see a specific certificate:

• Go to the course the certificate(s) were issued in and you can download such from that course by clicking the appropriate link in that course.

To see all of your certificates:

• Once logged in, you can click your name/initials/picture at the top-right, choose Profile, and click on My Certificates. The page that comes up will show you all certificates that have been issued to you or that you have downloaded manually.

To qualify for a course attendance certificate, you have to attend at least 50% of each course's live sessions. Some courses may only issue completion certificates which require completing the completion certificate's requirements and there will typically be no attendance certificate in those cases.

No. The school's material is designed for researchers, and will not be helpful for high schoolers. 

The following steps should resolve the issue (if not, send us an email to support@tech.alliancecan.ca):

1. Go to https://training.computeontario.ca/createcotacct.php
2. Type in your email and click submit.
3. Check your inbox for an email from the web site.
   • Only bother with the last email received.
4. Instead of clicking the link in that email, right-click your mouse on it and copy the link.
   • If your default browser is not the same browser as you used with step 2 then clicking will not work.
5. Paste the link in the web browser you used in step 2 within 10 minutes of doing step 2.
6. Now you can complete filling in the details for your account and finalize account creation.

You have to wait for at least a day to see your attendance properly reflected on the course page. If after one day you still have a problem with the attendance, please send us a ticket to support@tech.alliancecan.ca with the subject "Compute Ontario Summer School".

While "WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!" is a serious warning by SSH, in some cases it is a non-issue and prevents access to the system one is trying to connect to.

One can suppress this warning message by adding to the SSH command line:

-q -o "StrictHostKeyChecking no"

e.g., if your ssh command line was:

ssh USERNAME@coss2026a.c3.ca

then use this command line instead:

ssh -q -o "StrictHostKeyChecking no" USERNAME@coss2026a.c3.ca

When does this message typically occur? If you had previously connected to that server with SSH, and after that the server changed its SSH keys/configuration, then when you try reconnecting to the server SSH will output, "WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!". (When SSH connects to a machine, it remembers things about that machine.)

A way to remove what SSH remembers about a machine's identification, one can use the ssh-keygen command on your computer, e.g.,

ssh-keygen -R coss2026a.c3.ca

Running such will delete the SSH server identification information for coss2025a.c3.ca on your computer. Connecting with:

ssh USERNAME@coss2026a.c3.ca

will no longer output that command (for this connection only) since SSH will re-download the server's identification (and there is now no previous server identification on your computer to check against since you just deleted it with ssh-keygen).

See the FAQ article titled "Are your courses recorded? How to access the recordings?" for the answer.

One common mistake is forgetting to prepend the username you provided when creating the Compute Ontario Training account with "cot-". For example, if you provided the username john.smith, use the following to login to the summer school site: cot-john.smith .

• First you go the top page for the summer school. For example for the 2026 summer school it is https://training.computeontario.ca/coss2026.php (just change the year number at the end for other years.)
• Next click "link to course" under the course you are trying to attend (this assumes you already registered for it.)
• On the next page, log in to the summer school site using your Compute Ontario Training account.
• Then you will find yourself on the course web page. The video links (separate for each session) will be located near the top of each session: "Live session" links with a blue circle with the letter b next to it.

All issued certificates are PDF files. Sometimes a program will fail to render them properly --we recommend keeping your software programs up-to-date to avoid this issue. Also be aware that modern web browsers will render PDF files without using any third-party programs --so there is no need to install third-party programs to view/print PDF files.

Some users have had issues on Windows systems using Adobe Reader. These users have had success for these uses has been by doing the following:

• Uninstall the Adobe Reader program.
  • ASIDE: Adobe Reader typically sets web browsers to run Adobe Reader instead of showing the PDF file and it is Adobe Reader --not the web browser-- that gives an error with the file. It is possible to change this setting but it is typically a different set of instructions for each web browser so it is not worth going into such detail here. Instead uninstalling Adobe Reader is and consistent.
• Access/Download/Print the certificate (e.g., via the web site).
  • (Might as well do this when Adobe Reader is not installed.)
• And optionally re-download and install Adobe Reader, e.g., if you want it installed.
  • Re-downloading it is a good idea to get the newest release and bug fixes. Don't rely on a file you already have if it was already giving errors with our certificate PDF files.

Send us an email to support@tech.alliancecan.ca with the subject "Compute Ontario Summer School", We'll be happy to help. 

No, we do not have repeated sessions. The courses which have more than one session need to be attended in their entirety, from the very first till the very last session.

Normally you should complete such quizzes (and any other completion assignments) before the end of the summer school - unless instructed otherwise by the teacher.

Our summer school courses do not have waitlists. Also, once the course is full, we cannot add people manually. What you can do is to wait till the summer school is over, then send us an email (support@tech.alliancecan.ca) asking for an access to the course contents including the recordings from the live sessions.

BigBlueButton's (BBB's) browser and software requirements are:

• https://support.bigbluebutton.org/hc/en-us/articles/1500005215921-What-are-the-minimum-requirements-for-BigBlueButton

NOTE: BBB is used exclusively through a web browser. If you're having an issue, ensure everything is up-to-date and perhaps switch to use a different web browser, e.g., Chrome or Firefox.

The summer school runs with parallel streams. It is possible that the courses you want to attend overlap in time.  If this is the case:

• If you are registered in both courses, you can only attend one. Please consider unenrolling from the one you won't be attending.
• If you are only registered in the course you will be attending, no problem.

Any time after the course you couldn't attend finishes, you can enrol in that course, to watch the recordings, access the materials etc. If the course is full at that point, let us know (email to support@tech.alliancecan.ca with the subject COSS 2026), we can enrol you manually - but only after the course is over.

We do not currently impose such deadlines. You can register any time - before, during or after the summer school - as long as the course is not full. (We do impose registration caps with some of our courses.) Registering after the course is over can still be useful as it will allow you access the course materials including live session recordings. You will not be able to qualify for an attendance certificate when registering after the course is over.

Typically attendance certificates will be available within a week after the course has been completed if not sooner. Completion certificates will only become available after you have finished all requirements to obtain such.

In all of our courses either an attendance certificate or a completion certificate will become available once the requirements for the certificate have been met.

Yes, you can still access the course materials after the school is over.