The Evolution of eLearning Within a Software Engineering Graduate Program

Introduction

Distance Education has been a driving factor within the Software Engineering graduate program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake for over twenty years. This program is offered as either a traditional face-to-face on-campus program or as an online program. The Software Engineering online M.S. program has been twice named 4^th in the nation in 2017 and 2018, 7^th in 2018, and 6^th in 2020 by BestColleges.com (BestColleges, 2020). It has evolved from one that delivered lectures into distant classrooms via 2-way satellite, to web-supported classes that held traditional class 50% of the time, to various blends of online and bimodal instruction depending on both the course and student type enrolled. All students admitted to the Software Engineering program are admitted as either 100% online students or as “regular” students. Online students are accommodated by classes that do not require student's physical presence on campus.

Enrollment in the Software Engineering program has historically been divided between local area students who work full time and international students who live on or near campus. Local students enrolled in 100% online classes were invited to attend face-to-face sessions of an enrolled class since the classes were typically offered in multiple modes of instruction. Many students would attend class 4-5 times a semester to participate in discussion sessions, and project demonstrations, or oral presentations. Since these students were designated as 100% online all on-campus activities were optional. However, many students participated in quite a few of the sessions. As the program grew and began to get enrollment from students residing beyond a reasonable driving distance, 100% online became a popular choice. In the last few years, domestic enrollment of local students has increased and bimodal classes have been in increasing demand as well as 100% online.

The focus of elearning within the program has centered around student project development, software processes, and project management. Course development involved use of instructional methods that enabled coverage of areas such as project planning, requirements specification, software design, software implementation in various language, testing techniques as well as exercises and practice within both agile-based (Beck et. al, 2001) and plan-based (Ahimbisibwe et. al., 2017) software process methods. The program curriculum requires predominately core courses covering each of the aforementioned areas of study. Course design revolves around design of assignments, papers, projects, video lectures, current readings, student presentations and writing assignments that require comparison and analysis essays surrounding key topics. Students are expected to develop a project plan, write requirements, construct software designs, and test software using various testing methods and develop projects using different coding languages and software development environments.

Within these efforts course design has been late to awareness, study and application of published pedagogical and androgogical theories and their implications upon course design. This is directly attributed to the fact that faculty have terminal degrees in Computer Science and not Education and are not intimately aware of pedagogical techniques and methods. However, indirectly, by practice and years of experience within the face to face and online classroom, pedagogical and androgogical concepts and theories have been unconsciously applied such as the use of a flipped classroom (Fulton, 2012; Nolan & Washington, 2013) and self-directed learning (Knowles, 1975; Garrison, 1997; Knowles, 1980) or have been instituted through guidance from instructional designers, and available teaching workshops. Many faculty have become increasingly aware of pedagogical and androgogical practices through these efforts and have updated course designs for online classes with methods for increasing faculty-student and student-student collaboration and engagement. Recently, with online delivery becoming even more in demand, the university has established a Center for Teaching and Learning Engagement that is staffed by Education Faculty who are available to help with pedagogical improvements to those who reach out for guidance. In the remainder of this chapter the progression of this Software Engineering program's journey through elearning will be presented along with the advantages and disadvantages experienced and lessons learned.