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Teaching Software Engineering for the Modern Enterprise

Herold, Michael J
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374192225

Abstract Details

2013, Master of Science, Ohio State University, Computer Science and Engineering.
Software engineering education traditionally relies on a standard lecture-and-readings format to teach students about the discipline. This paradigm is comfortable for instructors, as it is the accepted standard in most disciplines in higher education. However, software engineering contains many subjects that rely on tacit knowledge. By definition, this knowledge is difficult to transfer through traditional communication, such as reading and lecture, instead necessitating practice and learning-by-doing. Furthermore, traditional software engineering courses do not teach students business concepts, instead couching the program in core computer science and the study of abstraction. Without understanding business context, students are less able to see the impact that their work makes throughout their careers and require more on-the-job training in their initial positions once out of school. This research addresses the problems of using traditional methods for teaching software engineering and excising business education from the technical discipline. Two contributions are made. First, this thesis describes a novel curriculum for teaching enterprise software engineering. By grounding the curriculum in a constructivist philosophy, the curriculum transforms the instructor into a facilitator for learning, rather than a lecturer. The course is restructured as an inverted classroom, pushing the concept of lecture into the student's study time and focusing the in-class time on active learning games, discussion, and case studies. This allows the course to contain more material, enabling it to begin with two units focused on business context. This refocusing encourages students to think beyond the software, considering how their work affects the position of the business and the people that will use it. Second, an a portfolio of curriculum evaluation measures its efficacy and the strength of the individual teaching methods used within. This evaluation contains three separate studies. The first study is a preliminary evaluation of the course that verifies its effectiveness. Additionally, the study elicits research questions for further examination. The second study is an in-depth look at the experiences both students and instructors have in the inverted classroom. By evaluating the individual components of the course, including the active learning games, discussion, and prerecorded lectures, this inquiry analyzes student reactions, the effects on instructor preparation, and acceptance of the format. The third study measures the effectiveness of the curriculum's major active learning game, a Lego-based workshop on agile development. Through using a questionnaire that measures student engagement and tracks their internalization of the course concepts, this study shows that the active learning game is as effective as the prerecorded lectures for teaching agile development concepts. This is a significant result because the concepts the workshop teaches are known to be tacit knowledge that is difficult to transfer in traditional fashion. The thesis then concludes with an analysis of future work to improve the curriculum and better measure its efficacy.
Rajiv Ramnath, Ph.D. (Advisor)
Jayashree Ramanathan, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
105 p.
Computer Science; Education
software engineering education; active learning; inverted classroom; case studies; case-based education

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Herold, M. J. (2013). Teaching Software Engineering for the Modern Enterprise [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374192225

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Herold, Michael. Teaching Software Engineering for the Modern Enterprise. 2013. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374192225.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Herold, Michael. "Teaching Software Engineering for the Modern Enterprise." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374192225

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1374192225
2,075
© 2013, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Teaching Software Engineering for the Modern Enterprise by Michael J Herold is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.