An Ontology-Based Learning System in IT Project Management

The development process is based on the state of the art IT technologies (metadata and ontology for knowledge manipulation, Web services, learner model, and intelligent tutoring systems). Besides interoperability and personalization, the proposed approach brings additional advantages, including: unitary interpretation of the content structure by different user categories or content providers; explicit specification of the knowledge domain, allowing the updating of the domain definition without major changes of e-learning tools and programmes; reuse of the learning objects with economical advantages by saving costs of (re)writing the content for the different course forms and strategies; reuse of the created tools in one domain in other domains; promoting the competency-based learning through the domain ontology and the relations between concepts and competencies. The results obtained in practice are very encouraging and suggest several future developments.

Seven Factors for the Quality Assurance of International Higher Education

As education becomes accepted as a service like any other, the market for trade of education services has developed significantly, with a diversity of providers competing to provide education outside their national boundaries. As well as providing an international experience to students, this can facilitate the sharing of expertise among students, educators, and policy makers who can learn from successes in other countries. This appears to be particularly important in the education market for software engineers and computing professionals, where the knowledge base is rapidly evolving. This requires, however, careful management of the service provision, which results in increased focus on quality assurance. Assuring quality is made difficult by many factors, some shared with quality assurance of education in general, and others unique to the international context. We present seven factors that represent the core challenges for the quality assurance of international higher education, and as such, represent a valuable tool for computing educators and others either currently involved in, or intending to become involved in, the international education market.

Open and Closed Practicals for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Learning

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are implemented in companies to improve their business processes. An ERP system entails extensive functional and technological aspects during its implementation. Teaching ERP systems for computer science students implies addressing these two aspects: ERP functionality and technological features. It is a challenge for teachers to design practical experimentation that students can perform in the teaching environment, due to the prerequisite of a deep understanding of the business processes, business user requirements, and the technological complexity of ERP systems. In order to improve student skills in ERP systems, we encourage active learning among students. In this chapter, we present a methodology using open and closed practicals to learn about both technical and functional aspects of ERP systems. Using these practicals allows us to prepare and organize this teaching/ learning process.

A New Industry-Centred Module on Structured Parallel Programming

This work presents the case for the introduction of a new module on parallel programming for the core degree programmes in the School of Computing at the Robert Gordon University, and elsewhere. Having been conceived and designed with the industry-leading tools for structured parallel programming in mind, this module introduces students to parallel architectures, structured parallelism, and parallel programming. The main innovation of our approach is its emphasis on the structured parallelism environments recently released by Google, Microsoft, and Intel.

Problems First

The importance of linking the problem-solving robot activity and the programming assignment, whilst maintaining the visual nature of the problem, will be discussed, together with the comparison of this work with similar work reported by other authors relating to teaching programming using robots (Williams, 2003).

Co-Operation Models for Industries and Software Education Institutions

In order to underpin software industry-oriented education and make it more practical, a co-operation model for industries and software education institutes is described and discussed in this chapter. Based on the popular engineering education theory conceive, design, implement, operate (CDIO) associated with MIT and other universities (Crawley, 2001), and the value chain theory described by Porter (1996), an industry-institute-interoperation (I-I-Io) model was developed with five evolutionary stages - isolated, oriented, interacting, interoperating, and converging. The implementation of this co-operation model between institute and industry within the National Pilot School of Software at Harbin Institute of Technology, while still evolving, has already shown considerable vitality in the development of software engineering education.

Curriculum Issues in Industry Oriented Software Engineering Education

Software engineering education has been emerging as an independent and mature discipline. Accordingly, various studies are being done to provide guidelines for the software engineering education curriculum design. This chapter summarizes the case for the need for software industry related courses and discusses the significance of industry oriented software engineering education to meet the educational objectives of all stakeholders. Software industry oriented curricula for the undergraduate and postgraduate levels are discussed. An industry oriented postgraduate level (Master’s degree level) software engineering course is also proposed which includes foundational and applied courses to provide effective training to future software engineers. This will lead to the enhancement of their employment prospects in industrial and allied sectors.

EMERSION

China and the European Union both face the challenge of building dynamic and internationally focused knowledge economies. Information Technology (IT) is a key enabler of such economies and IT education must be at the forefront of any strategy to meet the challenges of building them. Recognising this, the School of Computing in Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Ireland, the National Pilot School of Software in Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), China, and the School of Computing and Information Technology in the University of Wolverhampton (UW), United Kingdom, established a collaboration which resulted in the EMERSION (Education to Meet the Requirements of Software Industry and Beyond - Establishing, Implementing and Evaluating an Industry-Oriented Education Model in China) project. This project designed, implemented, and evaluated an education model with an industrial ethos to deliver sustainable, high-quality, and effective IT education in HIT. The project was completed in 2006, and this chapter presents a review of the main lessons that emerged from it.

Introduction to the Broad Concepts Underlying this Book

This introductory chapter presents general suggestions on the concept of quality-assured industry-oriented higher education in software engineering that relate to and underpin the other chapters in the book. The body of work reported here was based initially on the close co-operation since 2002 between Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland and Harbin Institute of Technology in China, and on the subsequent development and propagation of this co-operation across Europe and China. The experiences described come from a range of countries, France, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, Romania and Turkey, as well as China and Ireland. They capture many of the interesting and valuable lessons of these past eight years of thinking and research and development relating to international software industry-oriented higher education in the broad context of the global striving towards the knowledge economy. They make the case for a strong role for software industry-oriented higher education in the production of the software architects, developers, and engineers required for the future.

UB1-HIT Dual Master’s Programme

This chapter presents a double complementary international collaboration approach between the University of Bordeaux 1 (UB1) and Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT). Within this framework, the higher education collaboration (dual Master’s degree programme) is supported by research collaboration that has existed for more than 15 years. Furthermore this collaboration is based on the complementarities of competencies of the two sides: production system engineering (UB1) and software system engineering (HIT). After a brief introduction on the background and overview, the complementarities between UB1 and HIT are assessed. Then a formal model of the curriculum of the dual UB1-HIT Master’s programme is shown in detail. A unified case study on manufacturing resource planning (MRPII) learning is presented. Preliminary results of the Master’s programme are discussed on the basis of an investigation carried out on the first two cohorts of students.