Network Services: A Spiral Teaching Curriculum (II)

Important: Translated automatically from Spanish by 🌐💬 Aphra 1.0.0

After defining the objective of this curriculum1 and classifying the evaluation criteria2, it is time to outline in general terms what we are going to dedicate each week to.

Ideally, we would have worked on all learning outcomes in parallel, deepening each of them throughout the course. However, as this is a vocational training program³, I thought it might be too overwhelming, so I have opted to group the learning outcomes. This way, a set of them will be learned in parallel. This does not mean that once a group has been worked on, they will not be revisited during the course. The assessments and projects are designed to review the content covered previously throughout the school year.

To promote formative assessment, evaluations will be conducted every week. Each assessment will allocate a percentage to reviewing some previous learning outcomes and another percentage to evaluating new criteria.

I believe it is good for students not to work with just one software for a particular service, nor with just one operating system, but the module⁴ does not have enough hours to dedicate sufficient time to cover the most used ones. That is why I recommend coordinating with teachers of other modules such as web applications or network operating systems. For example, Apache on Windows can be used in web applications and Nginx on Ubuntu Server can be used in network services. The network operating systems module can also be taught focusing on Windows and the network services module focusing on Linux.

In this case, I have chosen to center the module on Ubuntu Server⁵, using the following applications:

• OpenSSH and Webmin for the remote access service.
• Vsftpd for the file transfer service.
• Nginx for the web server.
• Bind9 for the domain name service.
• Isc-dhcp-server for the dynamic network configuration service.
• Postfix and Squirrelmail for the mail service.
• FreeRadius for wireless network security.
• Squid as a proxy and WireGuard as a VPN for connecting private and public networks.

This does not mean that I will not occasionally use other tools and other operating systems, as well as control panel solutions from hosting companies.

Below, you have a work proposal for each of the weeks of the module:

*I usually dedicate only one week to review, but given that the students at this level had emergency instruction during the third trimester of the past course, I thought it appropriate to dedicate twice as much time to avoid gaps that might hinder the assimilation of new content.

The order and grouping of learning outcomes is based on subjective criteria. If anyone is particularly interested in this, I could provide an explanation.

I would like those teachers who have taught the module before to share their opinions on this temporal distribution, as well as alternative ways of approaching it.

Once we reach a consensus here, it will be time to decide what content to work on and/or what criteria to evaluate in each session.

Update: You can now find the conclusion of this series here.