Cloud Computing skills have been increasing in demand. Many software engineers are learning these skills and taking cloud certification examinations to be job competitive. Preparing undergraduates to ...be cloud-certified remains challenging as cloud computing is a relatively new topic in the computing curriculum, and many of these certifications require working experience. In this paper, we report our experiences designing a course with experiential learning to prepare our computing undergraduates to take the cloud certification. We adopt a university project-based experiential learning framework to engage industry partners who provide project requirements for students to develop cloud solutions and an experiential risk learning model to design the course contents. We prepare these students to take on the Amazon Web Services Solution Architect - Associate (AWS-SAA) while doing the course. We do this over 3 semester terms and report our findings before and after our design with experiential learning. We are motivated by the students' average 93% passing rates over the terms. Even when the certification is taken out of the graded components, we still see an encouraging 89% participation rate. The quantitative feedback shows increased ratings across the survey questions compared to before experiential learning. We acknowledge concerns about the students' heavy workload and increased administrative efforts for the faculty members. We summarise our approach with actionable weekly topics, activities and takeaways. We hope this experience report can help other educators design cloud computing content and certifications for computing students in software engineering.
Science communication forms the bridge between computer science researchers and their target audience. Researchers who can effectively draw attention to their research findings and communicate them ...comprehensibly not only help their target audience to actually learn something, but also benefit themselves from the increased visibility of their work and person. However, the necessary skills for good science communication must also be taught, and this has so far been neglected in the field of software engineering education.
We therefore designed and implemented a science communication seminar for bachelor students of computer science curricula. Students take the position of a researcher who, shortly after publication, is faced with having to draw attention to the paper and effectively communicate the contents of the paper to one or more target audiences. Based on this scenario, each student develops a communication strategy for an already published software engineering research paper and tests the resulting ideas with the other seminar participants.
We explain our design decisions for the seminar, and combine our experiences with responses to a participant survey into lessons learned. With this experience report, we intend to motivate and enable other lecturers to offer a similar seminar at their university. Collectively, university lecturers can prepare the next generation of computer science researchers to not only be experts in their field, but also to communicate research findings more effectively.
It is now more than 10 years after the publication of the monograph, The Activist Teaching Profession, which, at the time, could be described as a call to action for the teaching profession. I ...reflect here on how far has the profession progressed in responding to that call to action. The idea of a 'call to action' could be seen to born out of industrial rather than professional discourses: 10 years ago different factors were shaping teachers' professional practice and identity and a call to action was a metaphor and a strategy to mobilize teachers. In this paper, I identify the factors that are still influencing and shaping the teaching profession and argue that different times require different responses and that current thinking and debates around teacher professionalism circulate around professional learning. In this paper, I argue that the time for an industrial approach to the teaching profession has passed. I make the case for systems, schools and teachers to be more research active with teachers' practices validated and supported through research.
Autism research is primarily targeted toward children and at normalizing autistic traits. We conducted a literature review of computing research on adult autism, focusing on identifying research ...priorities set by autistic adults and their allies, determining participation levels, identifying how autism is conceptualized, and the types of technologies designed and their purposes. We found: 1) that computing research in adult autism is neither representative of older and non-binary adults nor of autistic adults living outside the USA and Europe; 2) a lack of technologies geared towards the priorities set by autistic adults and their allies, and 3) that computing research primarily views adult autism as a medical deficit and builds design solutions and technologies that follow this marginalizing narrative. We discuss the status quo and provide recommendations for computing researchers to encourage research built on user needs and respectful of autistic adults.
We present the design and evolution of a project-based course - Designing for Real People - that aims to teach agile software development through an unwavering focus on the user, rather than ...emphasising the processes and tools often associated with a method like Scrum. This module is the result of a fruitful collaboration between a Computer Science Department, bringing knowledge and skills in the software engineering aspects, and the Service Design group of a neighbouring Art College, with expertise in user research and user experience design.
We present the details of the current structure, content and assessment strategies developed for the module, as well as the principles behind its design. The core theme of the course is gathering and responding to feedback, and so here we present how this has been applied to the design of the module itself, with lessons learned, and improvements made over time. By reflecting on our own work, we aim to provide recommendations that may aid others considering how to teach these topics.
Software development teams have to face stress caused by deadlines, staff turnover, or individual differences in commitment, expertise, and time zones. While students are typically taught the theory ...of software project management, their exposure to such stress factors is usually limited. However, preparing students for the stress they will have to endure once they work in project teams is important for their own sake, as well as for the sake of team performance in the face of stress. Team performance has been linked to the diversity of software development teams, but little is known about how diversity influences the stress experienced in teams. In order to shed light on this aspect, we provided students with the opportunity to self-experience the basics of project management in self-organizing teams, and studied the impact of six diversity dimensions on team performance, coping with stressors, and positive perceived learning effects. Three controlled experiments at two universities with a total of 65 participants suggest that the social background impacts the perceived stressors the most, while age and work experience have the highest impact on perceived learnings. Most diversity dimensions have a medium correlation with the quality of work, yet no significant relation to the team performance. This lays the foundation to improve students' training for software engineering teamwork based on their diversity-related needs and to create diversity-sensitive awareness among educators, employers and researchers.
Constructive master's thesis work in industry Knauss, Eric
2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET),
05/2021
Conference Proceeding
Open access
Context: Software engineering researchers and practitioners rely on empirical evidence from the field. Thus, education of software engineers must include strong and applied education in empirical ...research methods. For most students, the master's thesis is the last, but also most applied form of this education in their studies.
Problem: Especially thesis work in collaboration with industry requires that concerns of stakeholders from academia and practice are carefully balanced. It is possible, yet difficult to do high-impact empirical work within the timeframe of a typical thesis. In particular, if this research aims to provide practical value to industry, academic quality can suffer. Even though constructive research methods such as Design Science Research (DSR) exist, thesis projects repeatably struggle to apply them.
Principle solution idea: DSR enables balancing such concerns by providing room both for knowledge questions and design work. Yet, only limited experience exists in our field on how to make this research method work within the context of a master's thesis. To enable running design science master's theses in collaboration with industry, this paper complements existing method descriptions and guidelines. It offers experience and pragmatic advice to students, examiners, and supervisors in academia and industry.
Method: This paper itself is based on DSR. Based on 12 design science theses over the last seven years, common pitfalls and good practices are collected from analysing the theses, the student-supervisor interaction, the supervisor-industry interaction, the examiner feedback, and, where available, reviewer comments on publications that are based on such theses.
Results: This paper provides concrete advise for framing research questions, structuring a report, as well as for planning and conducting design science research with practitioners.
Document redaction has become increasingly important for individuals and organizations. This article investigates public-sector information redaction practices in order to determine if they ...adequately protect personal information from accidental disclosure due to redaction errors. Despite the importance of this in respect of data protection, 66.4% of those Public Authorities that responded did not hold formal policies or procedures at all . To assess those policies that did exist, we produced a 17-item check list of minimum best practice. Even those with policies and procedures had substantial defects to some degree (with the median performance being 29.4% on our checklist), with policies frequently recommending the use of high-risk redaction methods and overlooking essential practices. This means that these existing practices amount to widespread breaches of data protection law on the ground. To remedy this, we articulate a new set of document redaction standards, which overcome the existing inadequacies in current guidance, as well as make proposals for regulatory reform in this space.
This book examines the tide of change facing higher education as it grapples with providing a more relevant and demonstrated value for its graduates entering the workplace. Based on their experience ...with the Business in Practice program they created, the authors share the rationale and practical approaches colleges and universities need to implement if they are to foster the development of a work-ready graduate. What sets the program apart are the two-credit courses crafted to take advantage of the unique knowledge and work experiences of industry professionals that complements our core curriculum. Utilizing experiential learning, the program is designed so that students can apply soft/smart skills in a progression that helps develop those capabilities that are beneficial for them and desired by employers. It is structured to bring internship-like experiences to campus, giving the vast majority of students a quality work-related experience that is impactful and relevant for today's economy.
PDF
