Sharing and Collaborating When Teaching Automatic Control: An Experience-Based Needs Analysis

We discuss two specific issues that affected the workflows in our career as automatic control teachers and that are related to how teachers may establish teaching-oriented collaborations with colleagues from the same or different institutions. The first issue we identify is the systematic difficulty that one encounters when wanting to exchange instructional material with colleagues, while the second is the complexity of establishing students exchange programs across different institutions and nations. We discuss the nature and structure of the two problems, discuss why and how they are connected, and draw practical examples of how these problems may affect workflows. We then present a strategy that aims at solving these issues based on the introduction of an opportune indexing of instructional material in terms of contents and complexity of such contents, and how this information may be graphically displayed so to ease human and machine interpretability. We further discuss how this approach was used on a smaller scale to ease collaborations among close colleagues, and how it may be extended and adopted on a larger scale.