Teaching Web Information Retrieval and Network Communications Undergraduate Courses in IT Curriculum

Abstract

INTRODUCTION With the pervasive use of social networks and search engines, the knowledge of computer networks and web information retrieval are becoming ever more important in an undergraduate IT (Computer Science, Information Systems, etc) curriculum. Over the last 20 years since the World Wide Web was invented, the landscape of undergraduate computer networks courses and web information retrieval courses has been going through tremendous changes. It has been 10 years since the first major computer networks curriculum workshop (Kurose et. al., 2002). It also has been three years since a major survey in the teaching of web information retrieval courses (Fernandez-Luna et al., 2009). First part of the paper surveys the undergraduate courses in two curriculum areas, computer networks and web information retrieval. The content of the survey includes the topics covered, the textbooks used, and major projects in these courses. The second part of the paper describes the authors' experiences in teaching such courses to undergraduate students in various discipline areas including computer science majors, IT majors, and non-technical majors. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The course survey part consists of three sections. Section II gives an overview and a brief history of computer networks as well web information retrieval courses in undergraduate curriculum. Next, the methods of our study are described in Section III. Section IV presents the findings of our study that includes the textbooks used, the topics covered, and the approaches to cover these topics, the lab exercises, and the programming projects. The second part of the paper discusses the authors' experiences in teaching the computer network courses and web information retrieval courses to different undergraduate audiences. One author's experiences about teaching of a special topic course Wireless Communications and Networks to non-major students is discussed. The second author's experiences in teaching web information retrieval courses to major students as a technical elective course and to first-year non-major students as a foundation seminar. Our combined thoughts about teaching computer networks course and web information retrieval courses to undergraduate students also are reported. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE TEACHING OF COMPUTER NETWORKING COURSES AND WEB INFORMATION RETRIEVAL COURSES This section presents the results of a study of sample computer network courses and web information retrieval courses offered in the last a few years in undergraduate curriculum. For the computer networks courses, the authors collected the information on the web from six universities that are representatives from either major research universities where the computer networks courses are available to the undergraduate students, or predominately undergraduate universities that offer computer networks courses to their students as an elective course. For the web information retrieval courses, the authors collected 40 courses from the web in the U.S.A. and in China and present a summary in the paper. networking courses In 2002, SIGCOMM held the first ever workshop focused on the subject of computer networks education, entitled Computer Networking: Curriculum Designs and Educational Challenges. (Kurose et. al., 2002). Eighty nine participants took part in the three panels of discussions, undergraduate curricula, laboratory-based courses, and graduate curricula. The workshop reports summarizes in a table a list of topics that a computer networking course should cover, as a minimum. These topics include physical network basics such as digital channels, coding, CSMA, and wireless networks; packet, circuit switching and framing; inter-networking; protocols; client-server programming; security and elementary performance measurement. Ten years later, another SIGCOMM workshop on the same subject was held in August 2011 (ACM, 2011). …