Forum for Advancing Software engineering EducationForum for Advancing Software engineering Education
Volume 6 Number 14 June 28, 1996
Contents:
Undergraduate Software Engineering Degree at RIT
ASWEC '96 Call For Registration And Program
Distance Learning Models (long)
Subject: Undergraduate Software Engineering Degree at RIT
RIT OFFERS NATION'S FIRST UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE IN SOFTWARE
ENGINEERING
Beginning this fall, Rochester Institute of Technology will be the
first U.S. university to offer a bachelor of science degree in
software engineering. The program was created in response to industry
demand, as companies require more reliable and cost effective
software.
Software engineering involves a teamwork approach to developing,
maintaining and enhancing complex, critical software systems. With an
emphasis on team-oriented approaches to software development, RIT's
software engineering program will prepare students for technical and
management careers in a variety of computer and software-intensive
industries. Co-sponsored by the departments of computer science and
computer engineering, the degree draws on the curricula and expertise
of several computer-related disciplines.
"As more companies rely on software to meet ever-changing business
needs, the demand for software engineers exceeds the number of
qualified graduates," says Mike Lutz, professor of computer
science. "Through this innovative program, developed with considerable
input from leading software-related companies, RIT will be at the
forefront in providing industry with software engineering
professionals."
Students majoring in the program will take 12 new software engineering
courses, along with computer science, engineering and arts and
humanities courses. The curriculum is designed to meet the
accreditation guidelines of the Accreditation Board of Engineering and
Technology.
"This program will help RIT meet critical needs of its industry
partners for engineering talent," says Paul Petersen, dean of the
College of Engineering. "Software development has become critical to
product development in many industries and should be considered in the
same manner as other engineered systems."
To find out more about RIT's undergraduate program in software
engineering, contact Lutz at (716)475-2472 or e-mail to
mjl@cs.rit.edu.
Subject: ASWEC '96 Call For Registration And Program
THE NINTH AUSTRALIAN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CONFERENCE
Email: iree_office@eol.ieaust.org.au
URL: http://www.sd.monash.edu.au/ASWEC96
July 14 - July 18
World Congress Centre
Melbourne, Australia
The following is an abbreviated program. For complete program, registration
information, and detailed descriptions of the tutorials and keynote speeches,
see the above web site, or email the conference secretariat at the address
above.
Official Sponsors
The IREE Society (A Technical Society of The Institution of Engineers,
Australia) in collaboration with the Software Engineering Research
Consultative Council (SERCC) of the Australian Computer Society (ACS).
Sponsorship of the Monash University is gratefully acknowledged.
Schedule Of Events
Sunday - Tutorials
Monday - Tutorials
Tuesday - Program, Trade Exhibits, Industry Experience Track
Wednesday - Program, Trade Exhibits, Conference Dinner
Thursday - Program, Trade Exhibits, Conference Close
THE CONFERENCE
ASWEC is a national forum for sharing ideas, experience and
development in the field of software engineering. The conference
addresses all aspects of the discipline, including
CASE
development methods and tools
software management
innovation and software experience
The conference aims to foster and support the involvement of
representatives from industry, government bodies and academic
institutions.
Invited speakers from internationally recognised organisations will
give presentations covering he following fields:
"Verifiation, Validation and the Future of Software Engineering"
John Staples, University of Queensland, Australia
"Industry - University Partnerships: The Wave of the Future?"
Nancy R. Mead, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
"A System for Evaluating the Congruence of Software Process Models"
Nazim H. Madhavji, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE TRACK
ASWEC aims to bring together software engineering researchers,
educators and practitioners in software industry, government, defense
and academia with a view to discussing what, and how, software
development models, processes, frameworks and methods can usefully be
managed and supported under diverse quality, productivity,
time-to-market and capability constraints.
ASWEC 96 introduces a track dedicated to the presentation of
late-breaking industry experience and case studies of
* the application of software engineering methods, techniques and
productivity tools,
* the management of software-intensive systems on stable, flexible
software architecures with interfaces to commercial standards,
* integrated software product development capabilities,
* disciplined mature software processes and their acquistion in
practice,
* successes and pitfalls in software development projects.
TUTORIAL SESSIONS
Tutorial sessions will be held on Sunday, July 14 and Monday, July 15
for conference attendees who wish to be brought up to date with recent
advances in several technically and commercially important areas of
Software Engineering theory and practice. The tutorial presenters are
all experts in their particular areas and have had considerable
practical experience of software development.
TRADE EXHIBITION AND SPONSORSHIP
A Trade Exhibition will be held in conjunction with the Conference.
Additional opportunities exist for sponsorship of the Conference
activities. For further information contact the ASWEC 96 Conference
Secretariat.
ASWEC 96 Conference Secretariat
Level 1, 118 Alfred Street
(PO Box 495)
Milsons Point NSW 2061
AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61-2-9929-0099
Fax: +61-2-9929-0587
Email: iree_office@eol.ieaust.org.au
URL: http://www.sd.monash.edu.au/ASWEC96
Subject: Distance Learning Models
DISTANCE LEARNING MODELS
Kara Nance University of Alaska Fairbanks ffkln@aurora.alaska.edu
Pete Knoke University of Alaska Fairbanks ffpjk@aurora.alaska.edu
INTRODUCTION
This paper is a working document. It has the modest goal of reporting some
distance education results, experiences and lessons learned that might be
helpful to professors who may be considering distance delivery of Software
Engineering (SE) courses in the future, but who had not yet had any direct
experiences in this area. It has been prepared to satisfy an action from the
SE Education Working Group meeting held at Daytona Beach recently.
The paper is mostly about three SE courses taught recently at the
University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) via videoconferencing ([KN96],[NA96],
and [KN95]). However, since one author had some prior experience with
distance delivery of a computer literacy course to the Alaska bush via
Interactive Digital Graphics [KN93A&B], the lessons learned and
recommendations cover experiences with both delivery systems.
BACKGROUND
UAF has been actively involved with distance education for many years.
However, the experiences with the use of videoconferencing systems for
distance education are more recent, and relate mostly to SE education.
The origins of those efforts are noted briefly below.
In late 1993, UAF established a SE track for its existing MS Computer
Science program. This track now has 3 graduates, 3 almost-graduates and
about a dozen students in various other stages of the pipeline. Several
of these other students and a number of new candidates for the program
reside in Anchorage, a relatively large Alaska city located 350 miles
south of Fairbanks. The Anchorage students are typically employed in
Anchorage as software professionals. They seek a Master's degree in SE,
but their local University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) doesn't offer it, and
for most of them a move to Fairbanks isn't feasible.
To serve such students Computer Science faculty members of UAF and UAA
started a cooperative MS Computer Science program in early 1994. The term
"virtual department" was used at the time to describe this joint venture.
Under this program Anchorage students could pursue the UAF MS CS/ SE degree
while remaining resident in Anchorage. Although they can take some required
or elective courses for this degree program locally from UAA, certain key
courses are available only in Fairbanks. The challenge is to make these
courses accessible to the Anchorage students.
The University of Alaska (UA) system, with headquarters in Fairbanks,
set up a statewide videoconferencing system about 1994 to serve
administrative needs. UA administrators made this system available to UAF
faculty for distance education purposes on a noninterference basis.
However, each course using this system was required to pay communications
costs currently set at $50/hr per site. This means that the hourly cost
of a Fairbanks-Anchorage videoconference is $100/hr.
The actual video conferencing system used is of the "large group" type,
called the VTEL 235M by its manufacturer. It consists of about $70k worth
of hardware located at each site, plus a central bridging subsystem. Each
site has a codec-enhanced PC-based system using compressed video. It uses
a bandwidth of 384k bits per second, which leads to adequate but slightly
jerky video.. Its attached peripherals include two 35 inch color monitors,
several microphones, an ELMO document camera, a Pen Pal Graphics Tablet,
a keyboard, and a VCR unit.
THREE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING COURSES VIA VIDEOCONFERENCING
To meet the needs of Anchorage-based students in the UAA-UAF MS CS/SE
program, UAF has offered three full-semester SE courses by videoconference
over the last 18 months. These courses, their offering semesters and their
instructors were:
CS694, Software Process Improvement, Spring 1995 (Knoke, instructor)
CS670, Computer Science for Software Engineers, Fall 1995 (Nance,
coordinator. 6 instructors)
CS693, Reengineering/Reusability, Spring 1996 (Nance, instructor)
All three courses were offered one night a week from 6:00-9:00 PM for 14
weeks in their respective semesters. They are discussed briefly below,
according to the following template:
Course Number
Course Name
Offering Date
Distance Learning Model
Distance delivery technology (e.g., video and audio conferencing, etc.)
Number of instructors (e.g., 1,2, ...,6)
Instructor location (e.g., Anchorage, Fairbanks, both, variable, etc.)
Number of sites (e.g., 2, 3 )
Character of student bodies at sites (e.g., homogeneous, heterogeneous)
Nature of instruction (e.g., interactive, lecture)
Communications bandwidth (e.g., high, medium, low)
Course Description
Discussion
Results
The Distance Learning Model subtemplate could be expanded and /or modified,
perhaps drawing from analogies with existing taxonomies of distributed
systems architectures. What is given here is intended only as a starting
point, not a polished end result.
A LIKELY QUESTION
Before discussing each of the three courses separately, we address one
specific likely question which is applicable to all three, namely:
HOW DO THE DISTANCE DELIVERED (VIDEOCONFERENCING) COURSES DIFFER IN
CONTENT FROM A THREE-HOUR, ONE-NIGHT PER WEEK COURSES WHERE EVERYONE IS
AT THE SAME SITE?
The short answer (opinion) to this is:
FOR MOST COURSES IN THE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DOMAIN, NO CHANGES IN CONTENT
ARE REQUIRED BECAUSE DISTANCE DELIVERY IS USED.
This answer assumes that in the SE course domain all relevant information
to, from and between students is received or transmitted by sight or sound
(and none by touch, taste or smell). Given a sufficiently high communications
bandwidth (the 384k bits per second used by the videoconferencing system
is judged to be sufficiently high), no essential course content need be
eliminated. (This might not be the case in other course domains, such as
cooking, chemistry, or flight instruction).
Within the SE domain some tasks such as requirements derivation at a distance
can be difficult. Any SE course requiring such derivations, e.g. for real
software development projects, would also be difficult to conduct at a
distance.
Sometimes instructional tasks that are almost trivial to do locally can be
done only with great difficulty at a distance. One of the authors once
taught the hands-on use of a computer simultaneously to computer novices
at three different remote sites in the Alaska bush [KN93A]. Most of the
students had no computer experience, and at the remote sites there was no
local person to whom the students could turn for help. In this case a
physical presence would have made the teaching task easy (See? You hit this
key here, and look what happens), but the lack of such a physical presence
made it quite difficult. A similar situation might arise when teaching an
SE course featuring the use of CASE tools.
Course content aside, in the SE course domain as in any other course domain
the fact of distance delivery makes significant changes in course teaching
and course management style highly desirable or essential. These changes are
discussed later in different parts of the paper.
COMMON ELEMENTS FOR THE THREE VIDEOCONFERENCING COURSES
ALL THE COURSES WERE NEW.
The courses were freshly developed, with no prior offerings.
ALL THE COURSES HAD ONLY TWO SITES
The two sites were Fairbanks and Anchorage. The use of a third site
(Juneau) is being considered for the future.
ALL THE COURSES HAD SIMILAR HETEROGENEOUS STUDENT POPULATIONS
The students at Fairbanks were typical MS CS students, while the students
at Anchorage were mostly experienced (and employed) software practitioners.
ALL THE COURSES INSTRUCTORS WERE INEXPERIENCED WITH VIDEOCONFERENCING
And success was possible anyway. This suggests that a videoconferencing
distance delivery system can be quite easy to use.
ALL THE COURSES WERE QUITE SUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONALLY
As judged from student opinions of instruction, student examination results,
student project reports and student presentations.