Feedback and Recommendations

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5.1. Students Feedbacks
On the generic questions regarding overall IoT capabilities, maturity levels and area of
interests, all the students were quite aligned by feeling that IoT is definitely a technology
that will revolutionize
the IT industry, both for commercial and private market.
The students commented that migration of IoT is also inevitable as most of the current
networks will be eventually connected to some sort of IoT network, opening up multiple
possibilities for industries. Another good point raised was that the overall IoT technology
requires a different skillset in the development and support workforce, challenging the
more rigid traditional IT structures.
Connecting many IoT devices will also increase the amount of data, as commented by
one student, this will introduce new possibilities and needs for industries to be able to
manipulate and create monetary values from it.
On the technology maturity question, few comments were related to the general feeling
that the security in IoT is a big gap not yet standardized or even clarified, opening up
also a new set of threats for the IT industry.
One student also manifested concerns on the IoT wireless technology, not yet fully avail-
able,
but also the fact that IoT devices still haven’t reach an optimal maturity in power
consumption management.
While answering the question on IoT area of interest, students manifested a very diverse
list of topics that they would like to focus on: the security of the devices, home monitoring
systems, medical applications and automotive automations. These areas could also be
taken into considerations for the next course implementations.
Second part of the feedback form was focusing on the Cisco Packet Tracer tool and on
the IoT exercises. Students were quite satisfied with the tool as five over seven graded
the tool from good to excellent, two students graded it ok.
Advantages identified by students, while utilizing the tool, were the ease of how simula-
tion can be setup, the fact that the tool is free and easy to download, and the fact that
Cisco Packet Tracer offers a big range of IoT devices and functionalities to work with.
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Students also seemed to like the fact that the tool provides the possibility to configure
the network devices via command line as it would be in real life applications, but also
that it offered functions to ease
the network setup, such as the automatic selection of
best suitable cable or a simpler user interface for the device configuration.
One student openly commented that Cisco Packet Tracer is a very good tool for learning
IoT.
On the tool limitations students highlighted the fact that the tool was often unstable, re-
quiring the need to frequently save the project in order
to recover from application
crashes. One student, working closely to the networking industry, also commented that
Cisco network appliances provided in the tool are also old and not updated.
Last limitation, mentioned by two students, was the fact that some scenarios were im-
possible to do while using Cisco Packet Tracer.
Last part of the form was related to the IoT simulations and the practical classes.
All students expressed very good feedbacks on the exercises, mentioning that it was a
very “compact” way to explain practically how IoT works and giving good comments on
the methodology of introducing pre-configured IoT simulation.
Positive comments were also received for the support given to them during the practical
classes.
Highlights mentioned were the clarity of the examples
on how devices worked, the visu-
alization process of the exercises and the fact that simulations were easy yet challenging
to use.
Only one negative feedback was raised by one student regarding the limited time and
the deliverables that were achieved within the two classes.
Same feeling was also shared in couple open comments regarding possible future en-
hancement for the IoT course. It seemed clear that more time
is required and a more
step by step guide on how to setup the exercises is needed.