Emerging Technologies supporting the Networking ... - IEEE Xplore

INES 2013 • IEEE 17th International Conference on Intelligent Engineering Systems • June 19-21, 2013, Costa Rica

Emerging Technologies supporting the Networking Academy Collaboration František Jakab, Peter Feciľak, Katarína Kleinová Technical University of Košice/Department of Computers and Informatics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Košice, Slovakia [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract— Goal of this paper is to overview the structure of the Networking Academy program as well as to identify emerging technologies which are supporting the NetAcad program even in content delivery or support of the institutions which are responsible for the content delivery. Besides of the general overview we are sharing best practice in creating collaborative environment.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Networking Academy Program is worldwide initiative implemented in more than 170 countries with 10 000 of Cisco Academies, 35 000 instructors and more than 1 billion students all around the world. The Networking Academy program delivers ICT training to help improve career and educational opportunities for individuals in communities around the world. Strong portfolio of Networking Academy courses is preparing students for the industry certifications of different levels (associate, professional, expert, and architect). Nowadays there are a lot of new emerging technologies which are supporting the institutions in ICT training delivery as well as they help the institutions in collaboration. Within this paper we will overview the institutional structure of the Networking Academy Program, structure in Slovakia and the ways how we are supporting collaboration by development of new supporting tools. II.

STRUCTURE OF THE NETWORKING ACADEMY PROGRAM

Networking Academy program do have a benefit of offering study materials which are aligned with the industry certifications thus providing up-to-date materials for education in the field of networking. The way how the e-curriculum is delivered to customers – individuals studying within the NetAcad program is through different types of institutions. So called Cisco Academies are supposed to deliver the course content to students in strong portfolio of the courses. Instructors of the Cisco Academies are required to pass through special instructor training which is delivered to them by so called Instructor Training Centers. All the academies within the Networking Academy program are supported in different ways (e.g. curriculum related questions, technical questions or administrative operations) by 3rd type of institution which is Academy Support Center. This new

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structure has been introduced in 2011 and it’s still undergoing through changes within the partner network. Technical University of Košice which is located in Košice, Slovakia has established its first Regional Cisco Networking Academy in 1999, in May 2011 the institution has migrated into new structure holding the ASC, ITC and CA roles. Nowadays, Technical University of Košice is offering not only the student and instructor trainings but also supporting tools to support the whole NetAcad community. The partner network in Slovakia contains: • 1x Academy Support Center • 3x Instructor Training Centers • 71x Cisco Academies (mostly secondary and high schools) • 9x NetAcad Resource Partners (industrial partners helping the NetAcad to survive) III.

GLOBALIZATION FACTOR

Any one of the worldwide educational initiatives do have a strong benefit in creating collaborative community which do have common topic – the networking as well as it allows easier mutual cooperation between different institutions which are implementing the same Networking Academy Program. The content of NetAcad which is leading to industry certification of Cisco Certified Network Associate is splitted into 4 separate courses – Network Fundamentals, Routing Protocols and Concepts, LAN Switches and Wireless, WAN technologies. As the Networking Academy Program is also implemented in number of educational institutions around the world such as high schools, colleges or universities – the main advantage of worldwide initiative is that the content is the same in any academy worldwide. This supports internships, study exchange programs as well as university exchange programs for teachers teaching the networking related subjects. Availability of the modern communication technologies support also cross-border collaboration in attending networking related classes from basically any place in the world. IV.

EMERGING COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATION

Nowadays there are number of communication platforms which are supporting Networking Academy institutions in delivering the course content to students basically anywhere around the world. As the program is

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F. Jakab et al. • Emerging Technologies supporting the Networking Academy Collaboration

global initiative it is also easy to continue with the already started studies at the other academy achieving the same result as anywhere else – the preparation for industry certifications. Technical University of Košice is delivering instructor trainings mainly as in-person trainings, however also modern ICT communication technologies allows the institution to extend the coverage of the offered courses beyond the scope of the country. The following technologies are used at Technical University of Košice to deliver the courses to customers (instructor community or students): • Webex – The web-based service available from any computer (Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris) as well as the mobile devices like iPhone, BlackBerry, or any other Wi-Fi or 3G-enabled mobile device. • Cisco Jabber – Service which instantly interacts with instant messaging (IM) and presence; IP Voice and Video Telephony; Mobile Collaboration-Anywhere on Any Device. • Cisco TelePresence - Deliver high-quality, lifelike video to all users and environments in any organization. It’s easy to scale and easy to manage. • LifeSize videoconferencing – offer high-definition video conferencing for small to medium businesses as well as software integration with different videoconferencing systems.

Figure 2. Cisco Jabber

Figure 3.

Cisco Telepresence

Especially we want to underline usage of TelePresence in education in Slovakia, because TelePresence technology is a new evolution step in videoconferencing.

Figure 4.

Figure 1. Webex

LifeSize

TelePresence is not just a simple videoconferencing solution. TelePresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present in the same room. Video is delivered in Full High Definition 1080p resolution, while every participant has its own place at the table which is captured and displayed at the other end in real life-size. Eye contacts, as well as gestures on faces and emotions are experienced the very same way as in real life. The TelePresence room is equipped with special sound and lighting technique, which is automatically adjusted in a way that people in the room do not perceive TV screens, but people on the other side of the “virtual” table. The Technical University of Kosice (TUKE), one of the key leaders in Slovakia in the field of introducing new, innovative forms of communication into educational processes and work with students, has installed its own

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Cisco TelePresence CTS-3010 room in 2010. This was one of the first installations of Cisco TelePresence CTS3010 in an educational institution in the region of Central Europe. The Cisco TelePresence unit at TUKE, as well as at other Slovak universities, is connected to the Slovak Academic Research Network (SANET) which provides a 10Gbps optical backbone network, with interconnections to CESNET (Czech Academic Research Network) and GEANT2 networks. As the backbone is highly overprovisioned, currently it was not necessary to implement QoS mechanisms into the network which simplified the Cisco TelePresence installation processes. Cisco TelePresence virtual meeting solutions are designed to provide users with the feeling that they are virtually in the same room together. To achieve this level of realism, certain conditions must be met: To present a life-like, high-definition image of a person in real-time over the network requires very stringent service level requirements for delay, delay variation (i.e. jitter), and packet loss. The meeting room environment also must provide a near perfect replication of lighting, acoustics, and ambiance. Seven universities in Slovakia implemented latest Cisco TelePresence videoconference kit. TelePresence offers HD transmission of video between two or more nodes in present time. Room set-up created feeling of presence in same room. Simple one click call establishment and almost no problems with call make this ideal solution for collaboration. TUKE was first university in World with transatlantic teaching over TelePresence Kosice – Paradise Valley Unified School District (K12), Phoenix, Arizona, USA (PVUSD) [7]. The course contents have been developed and realized by the Cisco Academy at TUKE and it provided the students and staff members of PVUSD with education in an internationally certified course called CCNA Exploration. CNL at TUKE also created portal for reservation of access to TelePresence rooms in Slovakia ((http://tp.cnl.sk). V.

EMERGING CONTENT DELIVERY TECHNOLOGIES

Modern trend in content delivery is via Web 3.0 user interface which is integrating 3rd party standardized applications like twitter, facebook, google+, youtube, vimeo, RSS feeding and others. Cisco Networking Academy has decided to deliver the courses content via the canvas solution from instructure where one of the main benefits should be the flexibility, scalability and standardized learning objects integration. The group management provides the flexibility in linking to 3rd party applications which are commonly used within the target community.

Figure 5. NetAcad Canvas

VI.

EMERGING SUPPORTING TECHNOLOGIES – COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT

Academy Support Center at Technical University of Košice has been involved in alpha migration (pilot in introducing organizational changes) and was closely cooperating with other migration teams in CEE/Russia/CIS region - Wave 2 of academy evolution migration. Based on the experience with the migration, there were couple of issues identified and implementation of the environment under the name of iPortal4 academy evolution has started. Key idea was to support ASCs with essential operations which are not covered right now with available technologies (community site and groups for ASCs). The key areas of support for Area Academy Managers, Academy Support Centers, Instructor Training Centers and whole Instructor Community were as follows: • Managing ASCs and ITCs in the area of responsibility • Management of communication groups • Document sharing and searching • Creating and managing events (registration forms) • Communication platform with notifications • Integrated incident-management (request tracking) system to solve issues with instructors community • Automated reports on the activities per ASC The Partner Collaboration Website was the result of development of new environment allowing AAMs, ASCs, ITCs and their key partners to communicate and collaborate together. The support part of the Partner Collaboration environment is the platform which allows the ASCs to communicate with supported community which is the instructor community. Mainly incidentmanagement (request-tracking) tool is used for that purpose. As communication platform we have used the experience gathered in delivering communication platform for instructor community for about 8 years. The system is based on drupal architecture which is using the singlesign-on (shibboleth) feature with the currently used accounts in NetAcad community.

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F. Jakab et al. • Emerging Technologies supporting the Networking Academy Collaboration

VII. PARTNER COLLABORATION ENVIRONMENT IN DETAILS

The pilot implementation of this Partner Collaboration environment has started within the CEE/Russia/CIS/DACH region within 17 countries. Within 1 month 140 institutions has joined into the project and started to use the services. The look and feel is similar to the Cisco NetSpace environment with the intuitive adaptive menu. The environment is capable of identifying user and institution roles. We are providing role-based menu depending on the services the individual or institution is allowed to use. Basically there are 3 parts: top adaptive menu, quick actions block on the right side and My groups.

Figure 7. iPortal Partner Collaboration Website Events

Every ASC needs to be aware about the activities which are happening on behalf of the particular institution. Interest might be in how many incidents were being solved in the defined time period, what were the success stories reported to AAM, how often is institution communicating with the supported academies, what is the type of communication, etc...). All of this statistics are generated automatically and could be used for the purpose of performance reporting for the institution.

Figure 6. iPortal Partner Collaboration Website

The ASCs and AAMs are allowed to manage communication groups which are aligned with the institution. Communication groups could be of different types (e.g. private, public, request-approval, closed). Serious institution is very likely organizing different events for the customers (usually instructors’ community). Sometimes they need to collect data for the event from the community. They might want to know if they plan to participate on the event as well as e.g. what type of meal they prefer, etc. Event module allows institutions to collect data from NetAcad or non-NetAcad users using the webform registration with automated export to XLS spreadsheets. As we are using the single-sign-on, data about attendees are automatically pre-filled based on their user profile. For the ITCs it might be important to collect data about the participants of the course as well as data for the invoice when charging for the service. In this case number of fields could be populated automatically thus making the process easier. Every authenticated person (member of NetAcad community) is allowed to communicate within the communication groups and share the content with the instructors’ community. There are also e-mail notifications for the content created within the group which is kept private.

Figure 8. iPortal Partner Collaboration Website Events

It is essential for ASC to support academies in their operation. Sometimes it is hard to manage communication with the academy individual, keeping in mind that NetAcad contact should be aware on the activity of his/her instructor as well as to keep track of the incident solving. Harder it is to generate report at the end of the year counting how many incidents were solved for individual academies or even to generate invoices for the services for them. We do have integrated incident/management (issue/tra-cking) system which is able to identify relationships between individual (instructor), its academy and representative of the academy (NetAcad contact) as well as relationship to ASC staff people which are responsible for issue solving.

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REFERENCES [1]

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Figure 9. iPortal Partner Collaboration Website Incident-management system (request tracking)

[4]

CONCLUSION

In this paper we have presented the overview of the structure used in Networking Academy program which is worldwide initiative. We have also introduced emerging technologies for content delivery which we are using in our daily operations as well as supporting tool to support the operations of the Area Academy Managers, Academy Support Centers and Instructor Training Centers within the NetAcad program. Our future work will be devoted to videoconferencing and other supporting tools to support the ASC and ITC operations.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT Paper is the result of the Project implementation: Competency Centre for Knowledge technologies applied in Innovation of Production Systems in Industry and Services, ITMS: 26220220155, supported by the Research & Development Operational Programme funded by the ERDF.

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