In the creation of the syllabi, the pedagogical theory known as the elaboration theory of instruction was used to carefully select the topics to be taught in class. In the classroom presentation, a bottom-up approach was adopted, in which practical and industry examples are used as the first means of introducing concepts, and then an interactive teaching method is used. Students were required to complete a large number of practical design assignments and projects. By this active and inclusive method, the students tended to engage actively and creatively in the course.
TopCreating An Industry-Oriented Curriculum For Software Engineering Series Courses In The School Of Software
However, in the School of Software within Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) at Wehei, where students take software engineering as their major subject, a practical industry-oriented teaching ethos is implemented with a view to students achieving a seamless transition to the software industry upon graduation. Not only is attention paid to the theory but still more is paid to the practice. To deal with the problems mentioned above, when drafting the overall curriculum, the overlaps, interfaces and interrelationships between the series courses in the curriculum are thoroughly considered and each course carefully designed to have a number of large-scale and hands-on projects for the students to complete (Fenwick & Kurtz, 2005; Reichlmayr, 2006). The overall scheme of the series of sub-courses is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Series of sub-courses in software engineering education
In this scheme, a single course in software engineering is not considered enough, but rather, the software engineering course is designed as a group of sub-courses to include software engineering, object oriented design, software architecture and design patterns, as well as software quality assurance and testing (Petkovic et al., 2006; Zuser et al., 2006). All are required courses. This group of courses is then followed by two optional application courses.NET and J2EE, of which the students select one. Both courses emphasize not only programming skills but also design issues, including software architectures and design patterns.
The contents of each course are described in the next section of this chapter, and in the following section, the inter-connections between them are discussed. In the final two sections, teaching-related issues and the expectations of students are further explored.