Developing and deploying software engineering courseware in an adaptable curriculum framework

We describe an effort to design an adaptable framework for teaching and learning in software engineering. We are developing a repository of asynchronous, multimedia courseware that facilitates the rapid incorporation of new advances in research and technology, enables courses to be tailored to individual student needs and interests, leverages innovations in educational technology and encourages innovation in teaching and in student learning. Our emphasis is on developing composable multi-level “knowledge and topic units” (KU/TUs) that can be employed to tailor course content and depth to fit the needs of a diverse student population. We have developed “live” and online course material for KU/TUs in software engineering and taught courses using this material. The framework was deployed in three software engineering courses (previously taught concurrently) and provides quite different learning environments for the students in each course and, to some extent, tailors the courses to individual students within the classes based on their skills, objectives and backgrounds. We describe efforts at formative evaluation. Student satisfaction is high and available measures of success, e.g., student performance, have improved markedly. We also describe a project now beginning to build on this prototype that will be accompanied by more extensive formative and summative evaluation