Integrating practical CISCO CCNA courses in the Computer Networks' curriculum

Nowadays, both wired and wireless computer networks have significant importance. In addition, we are entering the world of big data analysis, where a lot of data is transferred from the sources to given computing centers for further processing. This trend requires changes in the computer science' computer networking curriculum in order to prepare the students with market opportunities and challenges after graduating. The Computer Networks (and / or data communications) course, or the whole knowledge area of networking and communication in general, are supposed to be a core part of computer science and net centric computing. Given the fact that these students prefer to learn software oriented courses, the Universities have to make the course more interesting and sophisticated enough to follow today's trends. In this paper, we present a new adaptive curriculum for the Computer Networks course. The students have the opportunity to choose between a practically or theoretically oriented course. Our intention is to make the most of the learning objectives in the course more practical and thus initiate increased interest of the students. However, the core part of theoretical lectures about low level reliable data communication is obligatory for both approaches.