Approaching System Administration as a Group Project in Computer Engineering Higher Education

The convergence of European higher education establishes as a primary goal the acquisition of the main skills demanded by the society. One of the main job prospects of Computer Engineering (CE) is System Administration (SA) as part of institutions or companies. In Spain, this professional profile is only collaterally considered in CE higher education and always from the theoretical perspective of operating systems. This paper describes a learning methodology that has been applied to CE students for improving their SA skills from a very practical point of view. The experience consists on a distributed laboratory where the students have to deploy different services of a typical distributed system. The innovation remarks are two: the definition of a professional distributed infrastructure as the target of the practical exercises and the implicit and mandatory distributed tasks between student teams. In addition, different professionals from public and private institutions have supervised the activity. The results of two polls (taken before and after this experience) show that student SA skills were considerably improved thanks to the laboratory. Moreover, the laboratory was an excellent tool to promote teamwork and collaboration among students and very suitable for transnational education, the lab being remotely accessed from different locations.