Active Learning Explored in Open Elective Course: Internet of Things (IoT)

There has been a tremendous change in the processing, networking and communication since last five decades, giving rise to a new research era which includes Internet of things (IoT) that helps to connect different devices, sensors and people. The research thinking in IoT is bringing a change in the life style of the society. As many of the developing countries are involved in construction of smart cities, there arises a need to educate current generation engineers to get knowledge of IoT. To cater this, an open elective IoT has been introduced at eighth semester by Computer Science & Engineering Under Graduate (UG) program for circuit branch students. This paper discusses the challenges and experiences of introducing IoT as an open elective course.@@@@@@ The first challenge in offering this course is identifying the content of the course, at what level the course needs to be introduced, since both hardware and software components are involved in IoT. Second challenge is involving students in learning process as it is not only theory based and different knowledge level students are part of this course. To address these challenges we followed activity based approach for teaching and learning this course. Various real-world problems are identified, and assigned to different teams consisting of four students. Outcome based evaluation is followed to assess the group activity. The author's observations indicate that the activity based learning addresses graduate attributes of UG program, such as Design/Development of solutions, Modern tool usage, Engineer and society and Life-long learning. The average attainment of the mentioned graduate attributes is 79.18% for the course in continuous internal assessment.