Internet of Things (IoT) technology and development is a rapidly growing field, as companies and innovators strive to create the newest and most capable devices, as well as new ways to use them. In light of the recent IoT-related DDOS attacks, it’s more important than ever for engineers and designers to understand the ins and outs of the IoT.
Luckily, for those who want to improve the IoT, there is an ever-growing selection of educational options to learn IoT programming, hardware design and the applications of this new technology.
Because of the quick-changing nature of the Internet and IoT, getting a solid grasp on every aspect of these technologies can be difficult. Depending on where you get your information, you can end up getting different perspectives and different thoughts on the best way to develop and apply IoT technology.
Below are some of the current massive open online courses (MOOCs) available for engineers who want to learn more about the IoT.
Online education platform Coursera hosts a number of MOOCs that offer both introductory level and more advanced IoT education.
Build Your Own Internet of Things: This 6-course specialization is offered by UC San Diego and Qualcomm as an introduction to the development of IoT products and services, such as devices for communication, processing, sensing and actuation. The courses cover a range of theory and lab-based work, with titles including:
- Internet of Things: How Did We Get Here?
- Setting Up Your DragonBoard Development Platform
- Sensing and Actuation from Devices
- Communication Technologies
- Multimedia Technologies
- Capstone: Build a Mobile Surveillance System
Create Your Own Internet of Things Device: Another specialization through Coursera, these 6 courses cover building devices that can control the physical world, including embedded systems, the Raspberry Pi platform and the Arduino environment. This program also involves a capstone project to design, build and test a microcontroller-based embedded system. The courses include:
- Introduction to the Internet of Things and Embedded Systems
- The Arduino Platform and C Programming
- Interfacing with the Arduino
- The Raspberry Pi Platform and Python Programming for the Raspberry Pi
- Interfacing with the Raspberry Pi
- Programming for the Internet of Things Capstone
There are also a number of stand-alone courses available focusing on specific aspects of IoT technologies and applications.
A Developer’s Guide to the Internet of Things: An introduction to developing and deploying IoT solutions, with a focus on capturing data from devices and sending it to a cloud platform. Students will use a Raspberry Pi device and a trial version of the cloud-based IBM Watson IoT platform.
Introduction to Architecting Smart IoT Devices: This course offers a beginner’s introduction to the characteristics of embedded systems – including possible applications and recipes for success, as well as the dangers and complications of these systems – in a framework of the currently embedded systems field: the Internet of Things.
Architecting Smart IoT Devices: For those who are at a more intermediate level, this course dives right into developing an embedded systems device and learning about hardware and software components available for IoT development, such as processor families, operating systems, boards and networks.
Embedded Hardware and Operating Systems: Intended for Bachelor’s and Master’s students, this course covers practical programming of hardware and operating systems as well as Cooja simulation to design and simulate wireless sensor network applications.
Coursera isn’t the only platform offering IoT MOOCs. The EdX platform also has some interesting options, such as Enabling Technologies for Data Science and Analytics: The Internet of Things. This course is primarily data-science-based; students will learn the major aspects of how data is acquired from sensors in the IoT, examine ways to analyze event data and understand how device-generated data can be used to make decisions.
In addition, the FutureLearn platform offers a MOOC simply titled The Internet of Things. This course is intended for engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs who want to learn the fundamental concepts of IoT and how it will impact machine to machine (M2M) technologies and Industry 4.0.
Each of these courses will give students a slightly different perspective or set of information. Since many of these courses are free to access and have relatively low weekly study requirements, there’s no reason not to check out several of them for a more well-rounded understanding of the IoT.
For more information and more courses to choose from, check out the Coursera, EdX and FutureLearn websites.