The main objective of the proposed SJEP is
restructuring of existing courses and introduction of
new courses in the area of networking and distributed systems within
the curriculum for the BSc degree in computer science,
at the Faculty of Electrotechnics, Automatics and
Electronics at the University of Mining and Metallurgy in Cracow,Poland
. Now, the Faculty leads only a MSc course; however
the BSc will be introduced in the near future, according to the
decision of the Faculty Council from November 1994. The proposed
project will comply with the directions of changes in Polish economy,
as well as the modernization of the educational profile of the
University of Mining and Metallurgy, in particular, the introduction
of the three-level teaching system (see the Development Plan for
UMM). Moreover, the project will serve in establishing continuing
education courses for the staff of Polish IT enterprises, public
administration and local government agencies. The proposed SJEP is
motivated by the following aspects:
Introduction of BSc curriculum in computer science
The existing curriculum in computer science at the Faculty of
Electrotechnics, Automatics and Electronics at the University of
Mining and Metallurgy in Cracow comes from the early 80's and covers
only a MSc degree. It does not cover the current state-of-the-art in
the contemporary Information Technology, which rapidly changed during
the past decade. A project of new curricula for the degrees of MSc
and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
(to be introduced) has recently been prepared, based partially on
similar curricula of Eidgen "ossische Techniche Hohschule in Z "urich
and Cambridge University. The new curriculum for the MSc has been
introduced since the academic year 1994/1995. Several new courses have
been introduced and the profile of many existing courses have been
modernized. A substantial part of those courses forms a block
concerning network design and configuration, distributed systems,
networked applications, multimedia systems and advanced software
engineering. This block will be taught in the future at the BSc level,
thus forming the core module of professional skills. The demands of
education in this block of courses are particularly high, while the
existing infrastructure for them is insufficient. The activities
within the proposed SJEP will cover the whole process of the courses'
preparation, i.e. definition of a syllabus, lecture notes, exercises
and assessment for each course, design and organization of
laboratories (together with the description of student exercises),
retraining of the teaching staff and preparation of additional
material, such as slides, lecture notes, etc.
Lacks of educational infrastructure
The existing computer and networks infrastructure at the University of
Mining and Metallurgy and in the Cracow's academic community is
already substantial. Cracow is the leading networking center in
Poland. All the 12 Cracow universities are now connected with a
fiberoptic backbone, running a FDDI and ATM network. The network is
based on 3 CISCO 7000, one CISCO 7010, a many CISCO AGS+ routers and 2
CISCO/NEC A100 ATM HyperSwitches. The community owns 3 supercomputers
CONVEX: C3820, C3220 and C120. The Department of Computer Science of
UMM is equipped with a mainserver SUN SPARCServer 690 MP (4
processors), a few smaller servers and about 20 SUN Sparc and IBM RISC
6000 workstations. However, this infrastructure is mainly used for
research purposes. The proposed SJEP is aimed at filling the gap
between the research and educational needs of the Department, to
assure a basis for the teaching activities. The existing resources
will be exploited throughout the project (the academic network and
mainserver, basic equipment of the Computer Networks Laboratory) and
the TEMPUS grant is requested to cover the rest of the costs of two
students laboratories (i.e. the Computer Networks Lab and the
Multimedia Lab).
Objectives