Impact of a Virtualized IoT Environment on Online Students

This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper presents the design, environment, and preliminary results of implementing a virtualized environment for an upper-division course offering in Software Engineering. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm rapidly gaining adoption in everyday consumer computing. Several recent publications and educational platforms recognize the potential for IoT to serve as this rich platform for computing education. However, most of these contributions focus on early undergraduate courses in small hands-on settings using general purpose hobbyist kits based on Arduinos or Raspberry PIs. This paper presents a new and novel IoT educational platform based on virtualization technology. The platform was designed specifically for scalable and complex IoT systems-oriented challenges appropriate for upper-division undergraduate study. This platform was utilized in an online setting at Arizona State University for the first time in Fall 2019. This paper presents insights from this experience, based on student in-class surveys, formal course evaluations, and the instructor’s perspective, along with a roadmap for maturing the platform.