In 1998, CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) initiated efforts to establish an Internet Engineering Curriculum (IEC) repository for teaching materials from University courses, vendor training materials, tutorials, etc. The repository, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and participating CAIDA members, provides a dynamic source of current, relevant materials that can be used by University faculty and others in designing or updating networking courses for their institutions. More information on the IEC is available at https://www.caida.org/projects/iec.
As an extension of the IEC project, CAIDA will help develop Internet Teaching Laboratory (ITL) facilities at several U.S. Colleges and Universities. Few networking courses include a hands-on laboratory component, often due to a lack of equipment. CAIDA has received a generous donation of routers, interface cards, CSU/DSUs, software and engineering expertise from Cisco Systems, Cable and Wireless, and MCI Worldcom that we will use to build ITLs at about 25 U.S. Universities.
We hope that this initial ITL effort is just the beginning of a broader recycling project that will put equipment being updated from ISPs worldwide into teaching laboratories at Universities. Understandably, vendors and ISPs alike are excited at the prospect that graduating computer science and engineering students will have had experience on modern networking equipment.