Context: Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become the predominant form of software development for global companies and has given rise to a demand for students trained in GSE. In response, universities are developing courses and curricula around GSE and researchers have begun to disseminate studies of these new approaches. Problem: GSE differs from most other computer science fields, however, in that practice is inseparable from theory. As a result, educators looking to create GSE courses face a daunting task: integrating global practice into the local classroom. Aim: This study aims to ameliorate the very difficult task of teaching GSE by delineating the challenges and providing some recommendations for overcoming them. Method:To meet our aims we pose two research questions ("When teaching GSE to students in Higher Education, what are the (a) challenges, and (b) recommendations for addressing them") and then conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) to determine the answers to these questions. Our SLR follows a carefully designed and validated protocol. Results: We found 82 papers that addressed our research questions. Our findings indicate that in addition to the challenges posed by GSE in general, particular problems arise in educational situations. The majority of these challenges fall into the "global distance" category, though teamwork challenges and people issues (such as trust) also commonly arise. Organizational differences between institutions, differing skill sets between students in different locations, and varying cultural work norms, for example, all operate within educational settings in quite different ways than in professional development teams. Integrating cultural training, conducting teamwork exercises to build trust, and instructor monitoring of team communication are all examples of techniques that have been used successfully by educators according to our review Conclusion: Despite the severity of the challenges in GSE education, many institutions have successfully developed courses and curricula targeting GSE. Indeed, for each of the challenges we have identified in the literature there are numerous recommendations for overcoming them. Instructors can use the recommendations given in this study as a starting point to running successful GSE courses.
Current CS1 learning outcomes are relatively general, specifying tasks such as designing, implementing, testing and debugging programs that use some fundamental programming constructs. These outcomes impact what we teach, our expectations, and our assessments. Although prior work has demonstrated the utility of single concept assessments, most assessments used in formal examinations combine numerous heterogeneous concepts, resulting in complex and difficult tasks. As a consequence, teachers may not be able to diagnose the actual difficulties faced by students and students are not provided with accurate feedback about their achievements. Such limitations on the nature and quality of feedback to teachers and students alike may contribute to the perceived difficulty and high dropout rates commonly observed in introductory programming courses.In this paper we review the concepts that CS education researchers have identified as important for novice programming. We survey learning outcomes for introductory programming courses that characterize the expectations of CS1 courses, and analyse assessments designed for CS1 to determine the individual components of syntax and semantics required to complete them. Having recognized the implicit and explicit expectations of novice programming courses, we look at the relationships between components and progression between concepts. Finally, we demonstrate how some complex assessments can be decomposed into atomic elements that can be assessed independently.Pre-print of the paper (accepted manuscript) for the institutional repository and not for redistribution. See terms of the ACM Copyright Transfer Agreement.
How might the content and outcomes of tertiary education programmes be described and analysed in order to understand how they are structured and function? To address this question we develop a framework for modelling graduate competencies linked to tertiary degree programmes in the computing disciplines. While the focus of our work is computing the framework is applicable to education more broadly. The work presented here draws upon the pioneering curricular document for information technology (IT2017), curricular competency frameworks, other related documents such as the software engineering competency model (SWECOM), the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), current research in competency models, and elicitation workshop results from recent computing conferences. The aim is to inform the ongoing Computing Curricula (CC2020) project, an endeavour supported by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society. We develop the Competency Learning Framework (CoLeaF), providing an internationally relevant tool for describing competencies. We argue that
This paper investigates the links between the contributing student pedagogy and other forms of peer-mediated learning models, e.g. open-ended group projects and communities of practice. We find that a fundamental concern in each of these models is the attribution of value; specifically, recognition of the value of learning that is enabled by peer interaction, and the way in which value is created and assessed within a learning community. Value is also central to theories of intercultural competence. We examine the role that the concept of value plays in the development cycle of intercultural competence and relate it to its function in peer-mediated learning models. We also argue that elements of social learning theory, principally recent work on value creation in communities of practice, are very relevant to the construction and assessment of the type of activities proposed within the contributing student pedagogy. Our theoretical analysis is situated within the context of a globally distributed open-ended group project course unit and our conclusions are illustrated with reference to student practice in this environment.
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