Have We Reached Consensus? An Analysis of Distributed Systems Syllabi

TL;DR

This paper reviews 51 distributed systems course syllabi from top universities to analyze teaching approaches, topics, and alignment with curriculum guidelines, providing insights for educators to improve course content.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of current distributed systems syllabi and compares teaching practices with established curriculum guidelines.

Findings

Variety in topics and materials used across syllabi

Many courses align with curriculum guidelines but some diverge

Provides recommendations for improving distributed systems education

Abstract

Correctly applying distributed systems concepts is important for software that seeks to be scalable, reliable and fast. For this reason, Distributed Systems is a course included in many Computer Science programs. To both describe current trends in teaching distributed systems and as a reference for educators that seek to improve the quality of their syllabi, we present a review of 51 syllabi of distributed systems courses from top Computer Science programs around the world. We manually curated the syllabi and extracted data that allowed us to identify approaches used in teaching this subject, including choice of topics, book, and paper reading list. We present our results and a discussion on whether what is being taught matches the guidelines of two important curriculum initiatives.