How our young colleagues are being educated....

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Dear NANOG Members,

It has come to my attention, that higher learning institutions in North
America are doing our young future colleagues a disservice.

I recently ran into a student of Southern New Hampshire University enrolled
in the Networking/Telecom Management course and was shocked by what I
learned.

Not only are they skimming over new technologies such as BGP, MPLS and the
fundamentals of TCP/IP that run the internet and the networks of the world,
they were focusing on ATM , Frame Relay and other technologies that are on
their way out the door and will probably be extinct by the time this
student graduates. They are teaching classful routing and skimming over
CIDR. Is this indicative of the state of our education system as a whole?
How is it this student doesn't know about OSPF and has never heard of RIP?

If your network hardware is so old you need a crossover cable, it's time to
upgrade. In this case, it’s time to upgrade our education system.

I didn't write this email on the sole experience of my conversation with
one student, I wrote this email because I have noticed a pattern emerging
over the years with other university students at other schools across the
country. It’s just the countless times I have crossed paths with a young IT
professional and was literally in shock listening to the things they were
being taught. Teaching old technologies instead of teaching what is
currently being used benefits no one. Teaching classful and skipping CIDR
is another thing that really gets my blood boiling.

Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges teaching what IPv6 is?

What about unicast and multicast? I confirmed with one student half way
through their studies that they were not properly taught how DNS works, and
had no clue what the term “root servers” meant.

Am I crazy? Am I ranting? Doesn't this need to be addressed? …..and if not
by us, then by whom? How can we fix this?

2

Dear NANOG Members,

It has come to my attention, that higher learning institutions in North
America are doing our young future colleagues a disservice.

Yes. Although, as long as they don't teach people that _every_ router
does NAT, we'll be fine.

Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges teaching what IPv6 is?

At the university I taught, yes. But that is in Europe, on the Royal
Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, for 3rd year in a MsC
programme in EE, Physics or CS. I am seeing similar cluelessness at
smaller proto-universities in Sweden, where they have bought a branded
course. Lots of Flame Delay. And EIGRP. Branded course. Our trainee that
came out of that did prove to be highly trainable, though.

What about unicast and multicast? I confirmed with one student half way
through their studies that they were not properly taught how DNS works, and
had no clue what the term “root servers” meant.

Multicast, check.
DNS, check.

Am I crazy? Am I ranting? Doesn't this need to be addressed? …..and if not
by us, then by whom? How can we fix this?

People who enter academentia in networking, especially to teach at
rural colleges, tend to freeze in time and stick to whatever fad was
"in" when they were young. Especially ATM is popular, since it has,
for all its uselessness, a nice theoretical undercarriage and stands
on the shoulders of decades of telco style "Warum einfach wenns auch
kompliziert geht?" (you will have to translate that yourself, it's German
and describes engineering well)

In Sweden, universities (where tuition is 0 for all citizens and can be
made 0 for all citizens of the EU) the universities have a third task
besides undergraduate production and research, and that is to interact
with greater society. The key to good education that fulfils the needs
of society is to ensure the interaction is two-way. Each course, get a
industry lecturer in for at least one lecture. This, if chosen well, will
make it impossible to teach Flame Delay in 2014.

3

*shameless plug*

Usually not a topic for this list, and together with two co-founders we
started an online university last to address some of the issues we saw with
higher education. We currently have approval from the state of Vermont to
give college credit, credits earned through Oplerno courses are
transferable to other institutions of higher learning at the discretion of
the receiving institution.

If you think that this subject should be addressed at a college level and
are interested in teaching it you are welcome to apply as a faculty member
to teach an improved course.

Kindest regards,
Daniël

Oplerno is built upon empowering faculty and students

4

SNHU offers -online- bachelor's and master's degrees in such well
known programs as "IT Management" and "Information Security." You can
even pick whether you want a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of
Science.

It's a -degree mill-. What level of quality did you expect in the coursework?

Regards,
Bill Herrin

5

Thankfully only about 30 minutes north of SNHU is my alma mater, the New Hampshire Technical Institute, a technical school which is fairly well known (locally at least) for its nursing, electrical engineering, and IT programs. The school's invested in a modern lab with a dozen or so equipment pods and borrows elements from the Cisco Net Academy program as well. They offer CCNP related courses every few years dependent on interest and just last year started a VMWare VCP program. We did touch on those old technologies, which to some degree do still exist in the area, but also covered all the good stuff too.

I'm under the impression SNHU has a couple programs it's good at, but to Mr. Herrin's point IT isn't one of them. It's fairly common to see IT folks around here go to NHTI for skills and an AS, and then SNHU or others to fill in the checkboxes for a semi related BS. The alternative is typically a more expensive school in and around Boston.

As far as the larger issue is concerned Javier, I believe it's a cultural problem where we're still encouraging our high school graduates to attend 4 year programs no matter what. The demand is still incredibly high (as is the resulting price!) for even not so great programs like the one in question. Unfortunately if potential attendees don't do their research to find out how graduates of the programs they're considering are doing in the real world, they'll end up like this.

Matthew Shaw

6

Did the standard packaged Cisco curriculum finally drop mention of
"Class A/B/C" and go CIDR?

7

Not only are they skimming over new technologies such as BGP, MPLS and the
fundamentals of TCP/IP that run the internet and the networks of the world,
they were focusing on ATM , Frame Relay and other technologies that are on
their way out the door and will probably be extinct by the time this

These sound like 'standard enterprise networking technologies' (still,
yes some other options are coming around, but .. there's still a
shed-load of atm/frame wan stuff to be bought, and really the 'mpls'
for enterprises is gussied up frame/atm without per-site ptp link
management at each site, no knowledge of MPLS is required on the
enterprise side of the connection)

student graduates. They are teaching classful routing and skimming over
CIDR. Is this indicative of the state of our education system as a whole?
How is it this student doesn't know about OSPF and has never heard of RIP?

enterprise people hide in 10/8 ... why would they need to care about
/26 or 27 ? everythign in their world is a /24.

If your network hardware is so old you need a crossover cable, it's time to
upgrade. In this case, it’s time to upgrade our education system.

but, the cross-over cable means my network gear still works and I
don't have to spend on replacement gear (yet). Remember, enterprise
network.

I didn't write this email on the sole experience of my conversation with
one student, I wrote this email because I have noticed a pattern emerging
over the years with other university students at other schools across the
country. It’s just the countless times I have crossed paths with a young IT
professional and was literally in shock listening to the things they were
being taught. Teaching old technologies instead of teaching what is
currently being used benefits no one. Teaching classful and skipping CIDR
is another thing that really gets my blood boiling.

you must require a large cooling vat then.

Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges teaching what IPv6 is?

enterprise networking... the name of the degree says enough to know
what's going to come out of the program :frowning:

What about unicast and multicast? I confirmed with one student half way
through their studies that they were not properly taught how DNS works, and
had no clue what the term “root servers” meant.

Am I crazy? Am I ranting? Doesn't this need to be addressed? …..and if not
by us, then by whom? How can we fix this?

you are getting a bit ranty, if you keep in mind the target of the
coursework (enterprise people) then basically nothing in your mail is
shocking.

8

For the most part yes. They still reference it for historical purposes
but otherwise it is all VLSM/CIDR.

9

* Valdis Kletnieks:

10

Learning how to do CIDR math is a major core component of the coursework? Im
thinking that this is about a 30 minute module in the material, once you know
binary, powers of 2 and some addition and subtraction (all of which is taught
in most schools by when, first year highschool?) you should be done with it.

Why is CIDR such an important coursework component? Or is it just a shibboleth
to filter out people who cant do simple gradeschool math in their heads or
just memorize the subnets (there's only 7.. I've only used supernets twice in
the last 10 years..) (I admit I slow down a little when I do wildcard
netmasks, but other than that.. ?)

I heard tales of kids (ie under 25) learning partial differential equations in
university or college as well (which I myself had trouble with but eventually
got, at least long enough to write the exam!) so why is the
mathematics/symbolics manipulation bar set so low in modern courses in any
sci/tech stream?

/kc

11

It's partially like a brown M&M backstage at a Van Halen concert - if their
coursework was so pitifully out of date it wasn't covered, you better start
wondering what *else* is lacking.

12

In addition to my "9 to 5" job of network engineer, I teach evening courses
at a US community college (for you non-USers, it's a place for the first
2-years of post-secondary education, typically before proceeding to a full
4-year university). The community college I work at participates in the
Cisco Academy program which trains students to get specific Cisco
certifications like CCNA, CCNP, CCNA Security.

I feel like the Cisco Academy program does a pretty good job at training
the students and and addresses many of the issues you found with education
in US. Without knowing for sure, your description sounds like that of a
"traditional" 4-year university curriculum. The Cisco Academy program
focuses on being up-to-date (revisions happen every 4 years or so) and
emphasizes working with (preferably physical) routers and switches from day
one. I've found 4-year universities, if they have networking courses at
all, cover too much theoretical material, emphasize legacy technologies,
and are updated only when they must.

Further, when in front of students, I always try and relate the material to
either what they have experienced in their professional lives (if they are
already working) or to what I see in my job regular. I try and keep the
students focused on what's practical and only discuss theory and abstract
ideas when necessary. I might not be able to do that if I was a professor
at a 4-year university, having worked hard on a Ph.D. then on getting
tenure. I think it's important to seek to be educated at schools and seek
to hire from schools where the instructors have copious practical
experience and, preferably, experience which is concurrent with their
teaching experience. That will hopefully get you a corps of workers who
are better prepared for a job from day one.

Just my 2 cents.

P.S. This is not to denigrate the value of a Ph.D. or academia. My mentor
in my network engineering career has a Ph.D. in Mathematics and having that
high-level education was a boon to his being able to understand difficult
networking concepts.

13

I've gone through the CNA (Cisco Networking Academy) program at a US college and got a 4 year Bachelors of Science from there. The program took me through CCNP level courses and prepared me well for taking the CCNP level certs. They also touched on a broad swath of technology from monitoring systems (namely MRTG and PRTG), to wireless, to audio/video basics, etc. And it follows the CCNP (and CCNA for those level courses). So when those change, like they did a few years ago from the 4 test to 3 test versions the curriculum was modified accordingly. Now yes there is some emphasis on a lot of "older" technologies, but they don't know where your career will go. So while I probably won't run into frame relay much, I could. And how routing protocols work in that environment are not the same as Ethernet based topologies.

The largest issue I found with my program I went through was that it simply was very arbitrary and isolated from what the real world is. And part of that is that they taught based off the Cisco courses. But it would have been nice to have some classes that were more real world interactions of how things work. For example, BGP communities or AS prepending were not touched in the courses. Or how video/voice is done in the real world (nobody really does a CLI phone system in Cisco VoIP phones which is what we were using). And we never touched Nexus stuff, which was still new at the time to be fair. We also learned on PIX firewalls and only had a few ASA's.

But overall it gave a fairly good foundation to build on, which was the point for me. I believe that networking is more akin to a trade than standard 4 year program in a business degree. Every situation, career, environment does things differently. Whereas accounting is going to be pretty much the same anywhere, just with some different applications used potentially.

14

Learning how to do CIDR math is a major core component of the coursework?
Im
thinking that this is about a 30 minute module in the material, once you
know
binary, powers of 2 and some addition and subtraction (all of which is
taught
in most schools by when, first year highschool?) you should be done with
it.

So... just finished up teaching a network course because the Math/Comp Sci
dept had lost professors I can tell you it was really tough getting across
the idea of four bytes of dotted decimal from binary and THEN subnet masks
and getting the students THEN to convert to CIDR. Many glazed eyeballs.

We asked some of the students who had taken the network class in prior
years and it was true that they learned very little of the things we
consider basic, as Javier mentioned. The profs seemed to have been
focusing on programming more than neworking per se, even tho the book they
were using covered the technology as well as socket programming. We
covered all of the things in Javier's initial rant and more, like the
principles of TCP congestion control and the history of packet switching.

It was fun being able to let them in on some real world things, like say
the sinking feeling of making a change in a network and then the phone
starts ringing off the hook :slight_smile: Unfortunately, this was likely a
one-time deal that the students got to really learn a couple of things
about networking.

Dennis Bohn

15

When I took my CCNA a bit over ten years ago, it was terribly out of date. That said, I beleive I was the last class to go through on that version. The next one added OSPF and some other things.

At the time, though, Ethernet belonged within a building. If you were wanting to connect multiple buildings together, bust out those T1s.

16

Last time I taught, I lectured (senior-level 3-credit elective) on calculating the efficiency of Ethernet and why it was no good above 10Mbps.

17

I will agree with most of the others that took the Cisco academy courses at
the local community college. it all depends on the instructor. My 1st
year was taught in the evenings by a full time Network Engineer. Best 3
terms I had. The problem was that year two was taught be a bunch of old
guys that used to teach electronics and DB classes. So everything the old
DB guy taught was how the network was like a DB.

I think that getting real world teachers are the only way to fix it.
unfortunately the program went away as the CC could not pay for new
hardware......

Scott

18

Yes when I took "networks" as part of my CS degree 12 years ago most of it was socket programming and had very little to do with infrastructure management. I don't think that has changed much talking to recent graduates.

Phil

19

My first reaction: teacher is former telco/bell labs/lucent worker and
thus his own experience slanted with the old tech telcos were swayed to
by telco vendors to make them incompatible with the new competition
called Cisco (back then).

20

All networking courses SHOULD have some version of binary in them. Too
many things rely on it to be skipped. Yes, in the real world we have
shortcuts. But when those shortcuts become the only thing everyone knows,
bad things may be left to happen. Besides, if one can¹t do binary, how
can they be expected to understand hex?

AnywayŠ Good these things are here, but one thing I will point out is
that there is a distinct difference with people glazing over because they
don¹t understand something versus the fact that something is truly boring.
There¹s nothing sexy about binary. But that doesn¹t mean it can¹t be fun!

So if the classes are Death by Powerpoint (which is very typical in
academia it seems), then I can certainly understand the aversion that
students would have to that.

Amazingly enough, for a skill that everyone SHOULD understand, I find a
tremendous number of people who don¹t. And for something that¹s boring
and nobody wants to learn, I have LOTS of people sign up for various
sessions I do at certain vendor¹s trade shows on that very subject. So
someplace there¹s a disparity in there.

Now, as a side, one problem that I often have with various academic-based
courses is that the people who teach them often don¹t have enough
real-world experience (or not current anyway) in order to pass along any
benefit in that matter. There are many things that need to be addressed
at this level within the higher-education arena, and I¹m sure it¹s not
just related to networking subjects!

Scott