A Pilot Program in Internet-of-things with University and Industry Collaboration: Introduction and Lessons Learned

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is one of the most prominent and burgeoning technological ecosystems The IoT ecosystem uses well-established technologies in many fields; and it adds new and often challenging requirements on extant techniques. At University of New Haven, we have embarked on offering a sequence of two-courses to prepare interested students for this market. The first course, piloted in Fall 2017 as a graduate elective course, covered all theoretical and applied aspects pertaining to the end-to-end IoT ecosystem. According to the anonymous feedbacks, the course was very well received both in terms of the breadth and in terms of the depth of the topics. The follow on course will be a more hands-on experiential course to complement the first course. In this endeavor, we collaborated with Keysight Technologies who has developed a robust IoT-specific educational platform. We evaluated the board as the main tool for the second course in our curriculum. The evaluation was performed by a team of students under the supervision of a faculty member. A number of experiments were conducted and the results indicated that the platform, when supervised properly, is a valuable tool to teach the concepts and functionalities of the IoT technologies.