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Teaching Networking: A Hands-on Approach that Relies on Emulation-based Projects

Authors:
António Nogueira
Paulo Salvador

Keywords: Practical teaching; networking project; emulation; GNS3.

Abstract:
Computer networking is an inescapable reality of our days, being part of the curricula proposed by almost all universities. Effective learning and teaching of networking, however, require students to gain hands-on experiences in developing projects, which will help them to understand basic concepts as well as the strengths and limitations of the technology. At our university, we devised a new approach to teach networking concepts by requiring students to develop emulation-based projects in parallel with traditional theoretical classes and practical classes involving real networking equipment. The effectiveness of this teaching methodology was evaluated formally by the students’ opinions and classification marks, and informally, in discussions within the teaching team. This paper describes the global philosophy behind this new teaching methodology, as well as its implementation approach and obtained results. The evaluation results that were achieved, representing a clear improvement of past results, allow us to conclude that the proposed approach is very promising. In fact, the emulation-based hands-on approach is able to motivate students and smooth their learning curve since they are close to reality and, at the same time, have the freedom to work everywhere at anytime and are free from boring physical connectivity problems.

Pages: 149 to 155

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: July 20, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3484

ISBN: 978-1-61208-365-0

Location: Paris, France

Dates: from July 20, 2014 to July 24, 2014