Experiences Teaching a Wireless for the Internet of Things Course Co-operatively at Multiple Universities

Today's computational devices are overwhelmingly wireless. To realize wireless communication, today's devices use a grab bag of protocols (Bluetooth, WiFi, 4G/5G, LoRa, NFC, etc.) and no one universal standard has emerged. This diversity presents a ripe pedagogical opportunity to introduce students to the fundamental tradeoffs and design decisions inherent to wireless communication and networking. Furthermore, many wireless protocols are accessible to study in a classroom (in fact, many we all use daily), which lends to a very hands-on course. We report on our experience teaching a new "Wireless Networking for the Internet of Things"course in three R1 universities across six offerings, with sections both in quarter and semester format and for undergraduate, graduate, and professional-master's levels. We share the scope of the covered topics, our approach for making the course interactive and hands-on, lessons learned from multiple iterations, adaptations to fit within different prerequisite chains, and different structures to adapt to different delivery formats.