**2. Educational challenges**

To the best of our knowledge, there is no official document specifically describing desired competencies in the field of IIoT. Therefore, we have extracted from [2], the following main technical IIoT-related desired competencies:


The required technical knowledge includes:


Therefore, it is possible to observe that there is a broad range of topics to be addressed, which is the first pedagogical challenge that instructors will encounter when trying to design an IIoT course. Here, we propose to select only a basic sub-set of skills and content, which is equivalent to focus on the expected quality and depth of learning, rather than on the number of tools or protocols included in the syllabus (see **Table 1**, Section 3).


#### **Table 1.**

*Course units: Theoretical content.*

The second challenge is the complexity of real world IIoT applications, which may impede their study, keeping in mind time and resource constraints [5]. Here, we propose to break down problems into simpler sub-problems, which can be solved within the allocated time, using available tools.

For example, the typical integration problem of a given control system to a remote dashboard can be divided into the following 5 sub-problems:


These problems will be further explained in next section, in the framework of a case study centered in our experience teaching an elective course to undergraduate engineering students.
