Story of a University Professor and Teaching IoT the IoTempower Way

Ruben has graduated with his PhD on Internet of Things and worked afterwards in the IoT RnD industry. He recently pivoted back to university and started a professorship with IoT focus. He has been an industrial guest lecturer of our IoT class several times and co-authored a book on Story Driven Modeling. As all the teaching material for our IoT course is public and accessible, the newly created videos, the course infrastructure, the framework, and of course the direct access to Ulno made the adoption of the course for his own classroom a very natural and easy choice. In Ruben’s class, it turned out that using a Raspberry Pi for a mobile gateway really helped to get students gathered into small teams around mobile infrastructure and strongly facilitated hands-on lab work. He had to slightly adjust the existing slides and wrapping your head around the flipped classroom ideas was not easy at the start but turned out to be quite welcoming later in the course.

Also Ruben’s class shows very high retention of students. Connecting lectures and labs with lots of discussions felt very natural and was supported by having planned 4 hours of integrated lecture/lab each time he and his students met.

For the final project presentation, Ruben decided to adopt the solution we used in Tartu where students must present group results in small poster style sessions, which was much nicer than just linearly walking through all presentations. The more exploration-valuing assessment through the portfolios (you can give a student points if they attempted a task and engaged long enough with it - completion is not required though usually achieved) also made the assessment a feedback as an instructor much easier than a traditional (more lecture and quiz based) class. There was even some small collaboration on the IoT discord server between Ruben’s and Ulno’s class.

Due to the openness of the IoTempower framework, Ruben was able to add some support for Apple hardware right during the class and added some ideas to IoTempwoer’s central issue repository that could easily lead to theses’ topics for students to take as a challenge. He is also looking forward to adding more teachers to the mix and growing the community of teachers and learners around IoTempower.