ICETA 2013 • 11th IEEE International Conference on Emerging eLearning Technologies and Applications • October 24-25, 2013, Stary Smokovec, The High Tatras, Slovakia
Networking Academy – The way we live, we learn and play. Peter Feciľak*, Katarína Feciľaková*, František Jakab*,** *
Technical University of Košice/Department of Computers and Informatics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Košice, Slovakia, **Cisco Systems Slovakia
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] have common topic – the networking as well as it supports mutual cooperation between different institutions which are implementing the same Networking Academy Program [3]. Content of the NetAcad which is leading to industry certification of Cisco Certified Network Associate is splitted into 4 separate courses – Introduction to Networks, Routing and Switching essentials, Scaling networks and connecting networks. 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.
Abstract— This paper deals with the networking academy implementation in Slovakia, compares the currently available solutions in content delivery and highlights available features of Cisco NetSpace. Besides of the general overview, site goal of this paper is also to share experience in building collaborative environment in order to support collaboration.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Networking Academy Program [1] 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 [2]. 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, the barriers to collaboration as seen by Slovakian Academy Support Center at Technical University of Košice and the ways how we are supporting collaboration by development of new supporting tools. II.
IV.
There are number of communication platforms which are supporting Networking Academy institutions in delivering the course content to students basically anywhere around the world. Modern trend in content delivery is via Web 3.0 user interface which is integrating 3rd party 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 infrastructure where one of the main benefits should be the flexibility, scalability and standardized learning objects integration.
NETWORKING ACADEMY PARTNER NETWORK IN SLOVAKIA
Partner network in Slovakia consist of 1 Academy Support Center at Technical University of Košice whose goal is to support academies in their administrative operations. There are 3 Instructor Training Centers in the partner network which are in Slovakia situated in Košice, Žilina and Bratislava. Their role is to prepare NetAcad instructors for the Cisco Academies which are able to deliver training to students. Currently we do have 76 academies in the network which are mostly located on secondary schools; however there are also couples of Universities. III. WORLDWIDE FACTOR Worldwide educational initiatives do have a strong benefit in creating collaborative community which do
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NEW LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
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Figure 1. Cisco NetSpace
Cisco NetSpace (Fig. 1) represent currently used learning management system which allows academies and individuals to access e-curriculum, complete the assessments and share the knowledge using text-based and video-based blog posting. Video blog posting is one of the new available features which deliver the question from student and answer from instructor faster and also with emotions which are undividable part of the blog post. Figure 3. Cisco NetSpace user management
Canvas CMS is based on wiki solution and thus it allows versioned modifications of additional learning materials. This solution supports the way how instructor can extend the knowledge delivered through e-curriculum also via own wiki-based pages.
Figure 4.
Cisco NetSpace WYSIWIG wiki-based pages
New learning management system can be also very easily tuned so the links which are not used very often can be removed from the menu which is visible by students. This supports faster and easier navigation in the menu. One of the greatest advantages of the new system is the Learning Tools Interoperability environment which allows the 3rd party application to interact with the NetSpace system and to gather information based on a class to which the LTI interface is linked. Historically, external tools have been built to operate within a single learning platform. This creates a functionality problem as users are not able to access the best tools to teach or learn the provided content. LTI enables a single tool to be utilized across many different platforms. In Canvas, LTI is referred to as External Apps. Cisco NetSpace, like many CMSs/LMSs, supports loading external resources inline using the IMS LTI standard. These tools can be configured on a course or account level, and can be added to course modules or used to create custom assignments. Canvas supports some additional integration points using LTI to offer a more integrated experience and to allow for more
Figure 2. Cisco NetSpace Video Blog-posts
When comparing Cisco NetSpace against previous implementation of Academy Connection, there are couple of differences even in the user-management as well as in the academy management area. The user management allows to enroll the students or instructors into class in different ways including manual search, seat tokens or different ways of automatic import of the users into class. At the moment there is one great disadvantage as there is absence of export for currently enrolled students. Therefore when considering the way of enrolling a student via automated import, it is required to compile the input files manually. Very likely the usage of Seat tokens is the most preferred way. When using seat tokens, every student is assigned temporary code (token) which is used with the purpose of identification of the student membership in a class and academy.
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ICETA 2013 • 11th IEEE International Conference on Emerging eLearning Technologies and Applications • October 24-25, 2013, Stary Smokovec, The High Tatras, Slovakia
customization of the Canvas product, even in a cloud environment. This is accomplished by configuring additional settings on external tools used inside of Canvas. OAuth2 is a protocol designed to let third-party applications authenticate to perform actions as a user, without getting the user's password. Canvas uses OAuth2 for authentication and authorization of the Canvas API. When appropriate, applications should store the token locally, rather the requesting a new token for the same user each time the user uses the application. If the token is deleted or expires, the application will get a 401 Unauthorized error from the API, in which case the application should perform the OAuth flow again to receive a new token. You can differentiate this 401 Unauthorized from other cases where the user simply does not have permission to access the resource by checking that the WWW-Authenticate header is set. LTI allows instructors to modify course menu so also additional 3rd party software can be linked with the class. One of the examples of such 3rd party application is export of the users into comma separated values file shown on the figure .
V.
MODERN APPLICATIONS TO SUPPORT TRAINING
Cisco Packet Tracer [4] is a powerful network simulation program that allows students to experiment with network behavior and ask “what if” questions. As an integral part of the Networking Academy comprehensive learning experience, Packet Tracer provides simulation, visualization, authoring, assessment, and collaboration capabilities and facilitates the teaching and learning of complex technology concepts. Packet Tracer supplements physical equipment in the classroom by allowing students to create a network with an almost unlimited number of devices, encouraging practice, discovery, and troubleshooting. The simulationbased learning environment helps students develop 21st century skills such as decision making, creative and critical thinking, and problem solving. Packet Tracer complements the Networking Academy curricula, allowing instructors to easily teach and demonstrate complex technical concepts and networking systems design.
Figure 5. Cisco NetSpace LTI extensions Figure 7. Cisco Packet Tracer
One of the benefits of new environment is also the possibility to create quizzes manually which can be used for the purpose of knowledge evaluation within the class.
VI.
COLLABORATION FACTOR
Technical University of Košice do have a strong experience in delivering supporting tools to community in order to support communication and collaboration. Within this paper we are going to share our experience in community building activities and potential barriers which we see as the Academy Support Center. From the experience which we have gathered we assume that communication is site-effect of the productive environment in the triangle between ASCCAs and individual instructors. Sharing an attractive content via the platform where we want people to come and communicate is essential in order to establish an communicating community. Usually the Academy Support Centers do know what important topics are for the target audience and therefore we believe that the community is created around the Academy Support Centers who should drive the community and their collaborative activities.
Figure 6. Cisco NetSpace Quizzes
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There are number of existing communities around the world which are using own communication channels, because those channels are currently being used to share important content. It is usually the e-portal solution or traditional e-mail communication. Key to maintain successful communicating community is to understand their needs, to understand locally relevant and globally replicable practices.
There are couple of technical requirements for the successful community environment including the following features: • No additional logins (SSO requirement) • Full localization / translated environment • Ability to identify roles, support the ASCs in the operations toward CAs/Instructors • Access to institution data – proactive approach in building the community around the ASC or proactive support for ITCs when seeking for their customers (instructor trainings) • Notification system for anything what will happen in the support platform
VII. TOOLS TO SUPPORT COLLABORATION 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 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 incident-management (request-tracking) tool is used for that purpose (shown on figure 8).
Figure 9. Partner Collaboration Website incident/management system
The Partner Collaboration Website (Figure 7) was the result of the analysis of the customer needs where the output was the requirement of the One Stop Shop for the communication, collaboration and support of the institutions (even in support toward their customers). Therefore PCW has been created as supporting tool for ASCs, ITCs, CAs as well as for the AAMs as the community of ASCs is created around the AAMs.
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 single-sign-on (shibboleth) feature with the currently used accounts in NetAcad community. VIII. FACTS ABOUT THE NETACAD The Networking Academy within more than 16 year history has allowed many students to participate and graduate in the program and its courses. The Table I. below shows example of current statistics (July 2013). Students represent a distinct count of students that were in a class in session within the past 12 months, while the cumulative students represent a distinct count of students that have participated in the program since inception. More key statistics: •
1 MILLION ONLINE ASSESSMENTS DELIVERED MONTHLY
•
100 MILLION ONLINE ASSESSMENTS DELIVERED TO DATE
Figure 8. Partner Collaboration Website landing page
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ICETA 2013 • 11th IEEE International Conference on Emerging eLearning Technologies and Applications • October 24-25, 2013, Stary Smokovec, The High Tatras, Slovakia
TABLE I.
Stude nts GLOBAL US China Mexico C&E Eur. Lat. Am. Russia/CI S Germany Czech rep. Hungary Slovakia
Facebook : www.facebook.com/cisconetworkingacademy [7] P. Paluch, M. Kubina, P. Segec: The networking academy program: Current state and future trends. 8th Int. Conference on Emerging eLearning Technologies and Applications, ICETA 2010 Conference Proceedings, Stara Lesna, 28.29.10.Kosice, elfa, s.r.o., pp. 383-388, ISBN 978-808086-166-7
THE ACTUAL NUMBERS
[6]
Cumulati ve students 4.75 M 1 073660
20 000 3410
10 000 1738
Instructo rs
Acad.
1M 118 039 41805 49556 74000 18400 0 26000
217304 265173 327000 815000
620 961 2280 3500
290 359 1130 1250
83000
830
510
33513 7780 5064 5522
152575 27336 22164 25192
798 202 222 156
323 75 82 57
From the perspective of Central & East Europe region the program plays very important role in the educating of IT specialists – Networking professionals for the future. In many countries of the region the program is recognized by governmental entities and integrated to the education system. IX. CONCLUSION In this paper we have presented the overview of the structure used in Networking Academy program which is worldwide initiative. We have compared the currently available solutions in content delivery and highlighted available features of Cisco NetSpace. We also shared the experience in building collaborative environment in order to support collaboration. Finally Partner Collaboration Website has been reviewed. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work is also the result of the project implementation Development of the Center of Information and Communication Technologies for Knowledge Systems (project number: 26220120030) supported by the research & Development Operational Program funded by the ERDF.
[1] [2] [3]
[4] [5]
REFERENCES Cisco Networking Academy Program, http://www.cisco.com/go/netacad World’s Largest Classroom Campaign, www.cisco.com/go/wlc Jakab F., Czacharowska-Rybkowska A., Beni G., Kniewald K., Schwertel M.: A Passport to Opportunity – the Learning Model of the Cisco Networking Academy, Innovation in Learning Communities - EDEN 2009 Annual Conference 1013 June 2009, Gdansk, Poland, 8pp (Book of abstracts), full version on CD (6p.)., ISBN 978-96387914-2-9 Cisco Packet Tracer : www.cisco.com/go/packettracer Academy Netspace: www.academynetspace.com
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