A New Approach for an Introduction to Computer Networking Course: A Case Study

The course Introduction to Computer Networks (ICN) has become one of the most vital courses in Computer Science and Software Engineering degrees and clearly is an imperative course for a degree in computer networking. However, despite its importance, the course suffers from many issues which lead to a high failure rate and low success. Even students who pass the course have problems understanding key concepts in data communication. One of the key issues is the theoretical nature of the material of the course. Many of the concepts are abstract and dry, which the students find hard to understand and boring. At the Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT), we encountered such problems with our networking course. We therefore decided to suspend the course for a year, research successful networking courses, and apply our findings to a revised networking course. One of the strategic changes that was made was to introduce more practical material into the course. Top-down approach to networking replaced a bottom-up approach, hands-on lab were added to the course, and online quizzes were included. This paper presents some of our findings and changes that were made to the networking course. The problems that were present in our original version of the ICN course are not unique to the JCT but are common to networking courses throughout higher education institutions. We therefore believe that the findings of our research can benefit other faculty who wish to improve their networking courses.