A distributed systems course structured using socratic seminars

摘要

Courses on some topics of computer science are being offered in postgraduate studies not directly related to computing. Such is the case of a course in distributed systems as part of a telecommunication postgraduate study in our institution. These courses present special challenges for curriculum design and instruction, as they often are made up of students who are both uninformed about computer science and distributed systems and suspicious of the course's relevance to their studies. In this work in progress we present our experience with one of such courses where socratic seminars were used to elicit an active attitude from students.