Faculty face many challenges both in and outside the confines of the university setting. They must increase the number of topics and the depth in which the material is covered while simultaneously reducing the number of required degree hours. In addition, employers have acknowledged an overall decline of soft skills among today's graduates. Further, faculty must address their material coverage for the multi-tasking skills of today's college students. In this article, the authors address the concerns voiced by the employers of college graduates regarding the apparent absence of soft skills competence and suggest an assurance of learning model for incorporating these skills into curricula.

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A growing trend in Software Engineering (SE) courses, especially in capstones, is to use an actual business or industry client for case-based projects. We will broadly examine approaches taken to deal with situations occurring when projects with outside clients are brought into the classroom at various size institutions in different countries. Specifically we will discuss the issues of client management, team management, project assessment, and preparation and planning for courses utilizing external clients.

This paper illustrates an approach used to enhance student learning outcomes in a combined cross-listed Systems Analysis and Design (SA&D) course and examines benefits perceived by students through analysis of assessment and students feedback. The SA&D course is a required course in both the Management Information Systems (MIS) major and the Applied Computer Science (ACS) major. The SA&D course was taught to a combined cross-listed class of MIS and ACS students over a period of two years. Two strategies were adopted to make the course a worthwhile learning experience for students in both majors. The first was to extend the scope of the course within the System Development Life Cycle spectrum to include planning before analysis and implementation (prototype) after the design. The second strategy was to have a running group project as the main assessment (accounting for 50% of the course grade) where each group had at least one student from each of the two majors. These groups carried out a system development project with four phased deliverables: system proposal, requirements specifications, design specifications and a working prototype with emphasis on user interfaces. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of how the combined cross-listed course was designed, delivered and refined for future offerings. It also examines the value of teamwork using students' feedback.