Contributing to IEC

Any resource or course material that is potentially useful to instructors or students of Internet engineering related disciplines is considered for the Internet Engineering Curriculum Repository. If you are interested in contributing to or participating in the IEC effort, this page details how; whether you are currently teaching a course or simply have a few pointers or addresses of potentially useful online resources.

IEC Course Materials: What is indexed?

IEC typically indexes:

homeworks
online lectures
projects
research papers
audio/video lectures/slideshow presentations
network teaching tools/software
other instructional course material, etc.

Anything which can be potentially useful for an instructor interested in putting together course material for an internet engineering class is considered a valuable resource. In addition to these key resources, we also make note of logistics like:

textbooks used and/or reading list
syllabus/course overview

...which are helpful in sizing up the difficulty level of the course curriculum. For each of these materials available at your course homepage, please include a named anchor link to it. Named anchors are described below.

Developing "IEC Compatible" Course Materials

If you are teaching or planning to teach a course and want to develop it with the IEC in mind, there are several unobtrusive ways to make the course homepage easier to index. Below are a list of such suggestions to make your course webpage more "IEC Compatible".

Named Anchor Links. Providing named anchors (e.g. <A NAME="textbooks">Textbooks I Use</A>...) for major subsections of the course page will immensely aid in IEC indexing. Named anchoring is completely invisible and unobtrusive, and allows IEC to index those subsections directly with our indexing scheme.
Commonly indexed subsections include lectures, course schedule/syllabus, textbooks used, or a reading list.
Lecture Topics/Titles. While not wholly important, giving brief titles to lecture slides (e.g. "Routing and Addressing") will make the indexing process faster, and makes the website more navigable in the process.
File Formats. In an attempt to make available resources as accessible as possible, materials in file formats will be indexed preferentially, with HTML as the preferred file format. If multiple formats for a given resource are available, they will be indexed in the following priority:
.html > .pdf > .ps > .ppt > .gz/.tar/.zip/.Z > (...all else)
Passwords/Permissions. The IEC Repository will not index into passworded or restricted-permission resources. If you want them included into IEC, they will need to be made available. We will contact you if we encounter a forbidden resource, asking whether this is intentional or accidental. Passworded resources are assumed to be off-limits unless specified by the instructor or other university administrator, in which case a guest account needs to be made.
Update IEC with Changes. IEC generally only provides indexing and links into a course homepage, so it is imperative that if the resources get moved around or removed, that IEC resolves its own links quickly. We are investigating the possibility of archiving and hosting course websites that will be permanently removed in order to preserve a current, useful resource from being lost. If you are interested in this option or know that your course will be removed or replaced by a subsequent one, pleaseso we can follow up.
Provide a Course Description. If somewhere on the course homepage there is a "Goals" or "Objectives" or "Course Description/Summary" section, that description will be copied into the IEC cover page or "synopsis" for the course. Providing a course description in your course webpage will allow a more custom-fit description of the course as it is taught. If no description is found during IEC indexing, the description from the university's official course catalog will be used in lieu.

Submitting Course Materials

You can contribute a full course if you have detailed information about the course. Partial submissions are accepted and welcome as well.

Alternatively, you can submit the URL with a short description, and we will explore the site and index it as necessary.

Annual Workshops

Annual technical networking workshops are planned to be held in either San Diego, California or Boulder, Colorado. The aim of these workshops is to provide participating faculty with teaching materials to help them develop or revise their networking curricula for their institution.

If you wish to be a participant in these workshops, or are interested in being an instructor for a workshop topic, pleasewith your name and contact information and we'll notify you when details of the next workshop are available. In general, links to information for the upcoming workshop will be available at the IEC Home.

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