Approaching system administration as a group project in computer engineering higher education

Research areas:

• Methodology - Machine learning

Year:

2012

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Authors:

• Gutiérrez, Pedro Antonio
• Sánchez-Monedero, Javier
• Hervás-Martínez, César
• Cruz-Ramírez, Manuel
• Fernández, Juan Carlos
• Fernandez-Navarro, Francisco

Volume:

189

Book title:

Third International Conference on EUropean Transnational Education (ICEUTE'12)

Series:

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing

Pages:

331-340

Organization:

Ostrava, Czech Republic

Month:

5-7 September

BibTex:

@conference{SAdmGutierrez2012, author = "Pedro Antonio Guti{\'e}rrez and Javier S{\'a}nchez-Monedero and C{\'e}sar Herv{\'a}s-Mart{\'i}nez and Manuel Cruz-Ram{\'i}rez and Juan Carlos Fern{\'a}ndez and Francisco Fernandez-Navarro", abstract = "The convergence of European higher education establishes as a primary goal the acquisition of the main skills demanded by the society. One of the main job prospects of Computer Engineering (CE) is System Administration (SA) as part of institutions or companies. In Spain, this professional profile is only collaterally considered in CE higher education and always from the theoretical perspective of operating systems. This paper describes a learning methodology that has been ap- plied to CE students for improving their SA skills from a very practical point of view. The experience consists on a distributed laboratory where the students have to deploy different services of a typical distributed system. The innovation remarks are two: the definition of a professional distributed infrastructure as the target of the practical exercises and the implicit and mandatory distributed tasks between stu- dent teams. In addition, different professionals from public and private institutions have supervised the activity. The results of two polls (taken before and after this experience) show that student SA skills were considerably improved thanks to the laboratory. Moreover, the laboratory was an excellent tool to promote teamwork and collaboration among students and very suitable for transnational education, the lab being remotely accessed from different locations. ", booktitle = "Third International Conference on EUropean Transnational Education (ICEUTE{\&}#039;12)", month = "5-7 September", organization = "Ostrava, Czech Republic", pages = "331-340", series = "Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing", title = "{A}pproaching system administration as a group project in computer engineering higher education", volume = "189", year = "2012", }

Abstract:

The convergence of European higher education establishes as a primary goal the acquisition of the main skills demanded by the society. One of the main job prospects of Computer Engineering (CE) is System Administration (SA) as part of institutions or companies. In Spain, this professional profile is only collaterally considered in CE higher education and always from the theoretical perspective of operating systems. This paper describes a learning methodology that has been ap- plied to CE students for improving their SA skills from a very practical point of view. The experience consists on a distributed laboratory where the students have to deploy different services of a typical distributed system. The innovation remarks are two: the definition of a professional distributed infrastructure as the target of the practical exercises and the implicit and mandatory distributed tasks between stu- dent teams. In addition, different professionals from public and private institutions have supervised the activity. The results of two polls (taken before and after this experience) show that student SA skills were considerably improved thanks to the laboratory. Moreover, the laboratory was an excellent tool to promote teamwork and collaboration among students and very suitable for transnational education, the lab being remotely accessed from different locations.