m u s c e l l a . c o m -- Building Electronic Communities

A group of faculty who teach computer networking courses at community colleges are working together to design a rubric for assessing their students' performance in the networking program. They have read an article, , and have identified the key concepts that are important for students to learn in each course and during their internships. Because the faculty are at two colleges that are about a two-hour drive away, they have decided to hold an online chat to set the parameters for their work. They have agreed to meet on a Tuesday afternoon for one hour.

Anne:	faculty in computer networking at Pine Ridge Community College
Dave:	network manager at software development company and adjunct faculty at Hopeville Community College
Bob:	network engineer at Internet Service Provider and adjunct faculty at Pine Ridge Community College
Vince:	faculty in computer networking at Hopeville Community College
Denny:	consultant on assessment and knowledgeable about networking
Kate:	faculty in networking engineering at New College
Ron:	network manager at software design firm
Alex:	facilitator for the conversation

Notice the role that Alex and Denny play. Alex is the process facilitator for the conversation. He asks questions, summarizes ideas, keeps people focused, and brings closure to the conversation. Although Denny does some of the things that Alex does, she is the content facilitator. She has expertise in both designing assessment tools and is knowledgeable about networking.

You can see that the participants in this conversations make short written statements. When Denny, Bob, and Vince have an idea that is more than a few lines long, they let everyone know that they are still writing. This allows the conversation to stay focused and people wait for them to post their ideas.

What follows is the real-time chat this group had on the topic of The OSI Model: Core Competencies

Anne: They definitely should know LANs-how to design them, how to run them with some software application like NT or Novell, and they should know troubleshooting.

Bob: And, they should know the OSI model. I mean really know what applications occur at each level of the OSI model.

Alex: These are all great comments. Vince, what kinds of work experiences would be most beneficial to students and what specifically should they learn?

Kate: I think the students should have internships in which they practice what they have learned in class. For example, students set up new users accounts using NT applications that they have spent a semester learning in class.

Bob: Let's say there is a network problem during an internship and the student troubleshoots the problem with his supervisor. It would be great to have the students reflect which layer or layers of the OSI model were involved in the problem.

Anne: I agree with Bob. But, how do we do this while students are working at industry internship and we are not available to really know what is going on? Denny:I am wondering if we can use the OSI model as an example of what is possible. Let's see if we can make some connections between what students learn in theory and then how they apply this theory as network administrators.

Denny:Okay, let's take an introduction to networking class as an example. Let's say they have this class during the spring semester and then they have a part-time job as a network administrator at the local telephone company in the spring. What would you want the students to learn during the course and then as an intern about the OSI model?

Vince:I'll jump in as I am the one who introduced the work place experience as being important. One of the things we know from our students is that they can identify the seven layers of the OSI model but they are not quite sure what happens at anything besides the Application level, which is the software application like NT or the physical layer, which are the wires, connectors, etc.

Vince:The five layers in-between seem elusive to the students so I think we need to find some really concrete experiences during the course that will help them understand these five layers in between layers one and seven. I don't know what kind of activities we could use to really help students to see exactly what it is these layers do.

Bob: I have one example for the session layer. When people shop on the Internet, say they are buying books at amazon.com, every time they purchase a book and put it into their shopping basket, the is data that is saved just for that session.

Bob: If after putting 10 books in your shopping cart, you decide that you really don't want to buy these books at all. You log off and have now left the amazon.com site. The entire time you were logged onto amazon.com the session layer was in use and through this layer, amazon's network was keeping track of what you were buying. Probably in the program is a default in which if there e is no activity from your account for a specified period to time, session layer concludes. Maybe there are some ways to make students aware of what happens during a session layer.

Dave: Bob, I think this is a great idea. What if we had students keep track of each move they made on one of the shopping network. We could then ask them to speculate as to which network layer described their moves on the shopping network.

Alex: Sounds like a good idea. How can you tie the two together-the classroom and workplace learning-and begin thinking about an idea for a rubric.

Denny:It seems to me that we could take two approaches. We could identify examples for each of the seven OSI layers and then describe the depth at which we want to students to understand the OSI layer for each successive networking course. We could then find 10-15 real-life networking problems and identify which layers of the OSI model these problems correspond to.

Alex: We are about at the end of the hour we agreed to talk about the rubric. How does everyone want to plan next steps and bring closure to this conversation.

Dave: I think we should each take one of the tasks and work on them at our own sites. Denny can work with us and then we can post copies of what we have done to the bulletin board. We could then schedule another chat.

Vince:Great idea. We will work on the workplace piece as we already have a team of industry people in place who can help us to think networking problems they face each day. Does this sound alright to everyone?

Anne: Great.

Kate: Same here Denny:Let's set a deadline for ourselves. How about two weeks from today both groups have a draft of a rubric ready and post it on the bulletin board?

Alex: Anyone not agree? I'll wait a couple of minutes and if I don't hear from anyone, I'll assume that we agree that the Hopeville group will develop the workplace rubric for the OSI model and the Pine Ridge group develops the classroom model. And, Denny will work with each group.