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IEC Repository Status Report

IEC Repository - Status 1999

(as of June 1, 1999)



Accomplishments

  • Presentations

    Evi Nemeth has given presentations about the IEC at the IETF Plenary, the Apricot '99 Educational Track, NANOG, and the EPSCOR meetings. Each time it was well received and several people offered help or materials.

  • Enhancements to Web Site

    Several courses have been added to the web site including some in Russian and in Japanese. These are harder to index, but their existence may help faculty find sample courses in other languages. We have attempted to get industry training materials with mixed success. Small companies say yes (eg. XOR Network Engineering), larger ones are still pending (Cisco, Bay), and some individuals who make a living teaching and writing have said no (Richard Stevens). Courses have been categorized by their level and listed only with other similar courses.

  • Advisory Board

    The advisory board has been formed from a mix of academics at research universities, academics from smaller non-research schools, folks from research labs, industry leaders, and ISPs. We feel we have identified an excellent group that is really in a position to give us solid advice on the repository and IEC activities. We have exchanged email and will meet for the first time, face to face, at the fall IETF meeting.

    Our advisory board is:

    • Chase Bailey, Cisco
    • Steve Bellovin, AT&T Research
    • Scott Bradner, Harvard University
    • Randy Bush, Verio
    • John Connolly, Univ. of Kentucky
    • Jon Crowcroft, University College, London
    • Jim Kurose, Univ. of Massachusetts
    • Rick Wilder, MCI/Worldcom

  • Database Beginnings

    In developing a mailing list of the names and email addresses for potential workshop attendees, we realized that we were data mining the web (by hand and with a focused task) and that we should collect more information and populate a database with it. In the database we have over 100 computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and telecommunications departments partially indexed. We are focusing on identifying the faculty currently teaching networking classes and the faculty in peripheral areas that might be assigned to teach it in the future. We can also capture details on the faculty size, number of networking classes, research interests of the networking faculty, etc. The database design is still undetermined, and changing; we are trying to anticipate other needs for this data within CAIDA and not limit ourselves to just the data that IEC needs now.

  • Audio/Video Lecture Archive Beginnings

    We have dabbled in audio/video techniques for capturing some teaching materials. Evi taught her networking class to students in Colorado and San Diego using the MBONE last fall. The class was a success; only one lecture had to be repeated due to network problems on the vBNS. We did not have the technology or staff to record the class, but intend to in the future. We did make contact with Larry Rowe, a faculty member at UC Berkeley who runs a multimedia seminar each week. Vern Paxson's recent lecture on TCP Dynamics will be our first entry into our prototype video server. We intend to build an archive of lectures that faculty can download and use when they are out of town or want to present another's view of a topic.

Still Pending

  • Review Process

    Our systematic review of the courses has not yet been implemented. We have a few reviews by the authors of their course materials, what their intentions were, and how well the course worked at their institutions. We do not yet have any formal reviews of the materials by someone who used them to build a new course. We expect the workshops to help us get the review process underway.

    Concept Graphs

    We have also not done the concept graphs that map the prerequisite structure of a course and index into the text and lecture notes for the course. Need a bright summer student to move this forward.

Failures

Workshop in March 99 Timeframe

We tried to hold a workshop in the middle of March, 1999. It failed to gain critical mass and had to be cancelled. We think that our method of advertising and announcing it to the community was inadequate. We intend to try again this summer when the pressures of the academic calendar are not an issue to participation.

Survey of CS Depts

We sent an announcement of the IEC and a survey asking about the networking faculty in over 100 computer science department chairs asking them to pass the information along to their networking faculty. Only about 10% of the surveys were returned; disappointing. We might have had better luck sending the information to the graduate/undergraduate secretary or administrative assistant to the chair and asking for their help in disseminating it to interested faculty.

Maintenance

We have been plagued with links that are fine when the class enters the repository and are dead a while later. Mostly this seems to be an artifact of the class being given one semester and then at the end of the semester the URL moving until the class is offered again. This has prompted us to ask authors if we may archive their materials, not just link to them. Most authors are supportive and give us their permission, but we are concerned with the protection of intellectual property rights if we archive the materials ourselves.

Internet Teaching Laboratories

We have tried with the help of MCI/Worldcom, Cisco, and the NSF to establish Internet Teaching Labs at several Universities across the country based on routers that are being traded in to Cisco for newer models by MCI/Worldcom. This process has become mired in both Cisco red-tape and in confusion between MCI and Cable+Wireless over the fate of the trade-in routers and the timing of their replacement. We will keep trying, as we feel this would be a win-win situation for all concerned, especially the educational programs in the networking area at our Universities.

Futures

Workshop in Aug 99

We have rescheduled the aborted March workshop for the second week of August and expanded it to three days. The first two days will contain parallel sessions, one on the ns simulator (for graduate classes) and the other on routing and TCP. The final day will be on Internet measurement and traffic analysis. We will be advertising the workshop by email (high quality targeted spam) to the mailing list of networking and operating systems faculty extracted from our computer science database.

Coral Reef CD

The CAIDA project Coral Reef is producing a CD of tools to analyze Internet traces and some traces themselves. There are also pointers to Hans Werner's archive of vBNS traces on the moat.nlanr.net web pages. We have contributed exercises to the CD that could be used as projects in networking classes. A copy of the CD will be given to all participants of the IEC workshops as well as mailed to the networking faculty list in our database.

SDSU Workshop

The xxx workshop held at the end of June at San Diego State University will publicize the IEC repository and the workshops we will be holding. We are providing them with materials to distribute to all attendees.

Internet Teaching Laboratories

We have not given up on the ITL project and will continue to arm-twist the appropriate folks at Cisco and MCI/Worldcom to get the routers released for University teaching labs. We have written a proposal which we will submit to the NSF for glue funding to establish the Internet Teaching Labs as an add-on activity of the IEC. The IEC advisory board will choose the schools where the laboratories will be located and the IEC and MCI engineering staff will design and oversee their construction and integration into the curricula.

Staffing

To date the IEC has been staffed with part time student interns under the direction of Evi Nemeth, who has also been part time (the other part involving teaching at UCSD and/or Colorado). In the fall, after the workshop, we would like to add another student intern, perhaps a graduate student who has had a couple of networking courses. In addition, we want to use more of Evi's time.
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