Student Work Experiences in Remote and Virtualized Environments

South Florida State College (SFSC) is a comprehensive community college and a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) located in Highlands County, Florida. This project intends to create curriculum and academic experiences, recruit students, and prepare students for contemporary virtualized information technology (IT) through its Associate of Science (AS) in Network Systems Technology. The new curriculum has the potential to enable AS students to earn a specialization in Network Virtualization. The project team plans to integrate faculty, student, industry, and vendor contributions into a replicable model for educating IT students to be network technicians working on remote virtualization platforms. The project will develop and implement a curriculum that extends prior work in developing a networking virtualization certificate. All of the components of the AS in Networking program will be directly or indirectly effected by the virtualization strategy. The proposed project plans to increase enrollment in the AS in Network Systems Technology and potentially increase the technician workforce of network virtualization. The goals of the project are to (1) provide AS Network Systems Technology students with ongoing, remote, and convenient access to Virtual Machine hosting platforms; (2) reduce the unsustainable cost of maintaining rapidly decaying or out-of-date on-campus lab hardware; (3) provide a project and system management learning experience in virtualization for students; and (4) disseminate the project implementation strategy to other community colleges in the Florida State College System through presentations at the annual Association of Florida Colleges conference. The project team plans to incorporate virtualization and virtual lab environments in eight existing courses and develop six new courses in virtualization and virtualization support. The instructional faculty will be trained in the new virtualization platforms. The project aims to strengthen industry partnerships and include industry inputs into the curriculum development. This project is funded by the Advanced Technological Education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the Nation's economy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.