A Constructivist Redesign of a Graduate-level CS Course to Address Content Obsolescence and Student Motivation

Abstract

The last decade has seen a rising popularity of active learning methodologies in Computer Science (CS), empowering students and developing their soft skills as well as their technical knowledge. In parallel, the speed of technological obsolescence also increased, creating challenges for teachers to keep their course content fresh and up to date. In this paper, we present a constructivist redesign of a Graduate-level laboratory course in Web Service Design and Engineering that leverages latent pockets of student knowledge to tackle these challenges through Learning by Teaching (LbT). We illustrate how such redesign was planned, deployed and evaluated, highlighting the guiding role of teachers in the process and discussing how this approach was able to solve the problem of keeping content updated while broadening both content and tools students were exposed to. Furthermore, we will discuss how the additional motivation stemming from their empowerment allowed students not only to perform more work compared to a lecturebased implementation, but also to perceive it in the end as a lesser load.

To Get Good Student Ratings should you only Teach Programming Courses? Investigation and Implications of Student Evaluations of Teaching in a Software Engineering Context

“…Often student evaluations are used by researchers in the CSE/SEE communities to validate the design of courses. For example, among (the many) recent software engineering papers the study of Ralph [40] evaluates the implementation of a course in Software Project Management, and Agneli et al [41] a graduate course in web service design.…”

Obsolescence in IT Work: Causes, Consequences and Counter-Measures

“…Technological change is often cited as the central driver for role changes and therefore obsolescence (e.g. [35][36][37][38][39]). Existing technologies change and develop over time.…”

“…Great flexibility in the composition of courses can also be helpful to allow for different specializations [58]. Another measure against obsolescence is a change in the way teaching is organized, for example, to promote non-technical skills such as communication [38,39,63].…”

Identifying the Static and Dynamic Nature of Course Content: Focus on Construction

“…It is an obligation to students and to the teaching profession in general for faculty to provide a classroom environment that is engaging, and with course material that challenges and informs students of new techniques, knowledge, and the critical reasoning skills necessary for the modern professional environment. Some examples where faculty document this course modernization include the efforts to further engage students in engineering economy [1], to introduce new methodologies relating to computer vision [2], or to address content obsolescence in a computer science course [3]. In any case, these changes generally involve and require substantial effort by faculty, many of them might feel uncertain if these changes can be successful after their implementation.…”