If data plane programming is important for you and if you regard it as crucial for your organizational development, then this course is for you. It is designed for advanced level students and professionals from a wide variety of computer networking and telecommunication area as well as public organizations.

Data plane programming is an open networked learning course from the Computer Science Department in conjunction with the Service Research Center – CTF. This course is designed for advanced level students and professionals with an interest in data plane and programming language P4 and is available to both for-credit (registered students) and non-credit participants (non-registered students). It features openly available, bi-weekly, interactive video lectures from a variety of Computer Science researchers, other researchers as well as practitioners.

The level of the course content is on advanced university level based on research and delivered by active researchers. This course will give you a review of data plane aspects, and teaches you how to program the data plane using programming language such as P4 for network innovation. During the course, you will learn from recent research, and facilitate data plane programming activities yourself in a learning-by-doing methodology. After the course you will: 1) know the main theories behind data plane programming, 2) be able to apply P4 to problems such as data center load balancing, network monitoring, control and caching, 3) understand and critically reflect about the benefits and limitations of e.g. P4 language, and 4) be able to propose new data plane design and implementation aspetcs.

The course centers around open collaborative and networked learning practices. It makes use of freely available tools that do not require extensive technical skills to be mastered and implemented. 

We regard learning as a constructive, collaborative, self-directed and contextual process and believe that using the emerging ideas of networked learning is the way forward for lifelong learning. One major intention in designing the course this way is to develop a community of practice around the course content as well as research at the Computer Science department.

The course encourages and nurtures rich interaction through a number of open spaces such as a Slack channel, and our participant blog hub. The open nature of the course and the sharing that it inspires, benefits current and future participants, especially as the goal of the course is to foster and develop long-term, authentic, professional connections.