This lightning talk focuses on the efforts of software engineering (SE) academics to keep curriculum relevant. SE evolves rapidly, with changing technology and industry expectations. The curriculum review bodies (e.g. ACM and IEEE-CS working groups) provide a foundation for curriculum, but can have refresh cycles measured in years. We aim to identify, and potentially increase, the confidence level of SE educators with respect to the relevance of their curriculum. It is also of interest to identify the sources academia uses to keep their courses current. and the role of gray literature (GL). Other fields have found GL useful in bridging academic research and industry needs. GL can be extended to SE to aid faculty preparing students for industry.

The Covid-19 pandemic, as Henry Kissinger mentions, will not only "forever alter the world order," but also potentially transform the ever-changing higher education world. The recent increase in technological innovations in information, communications, and computer technology has profoundly transformed traditional teaching-learning processes and peer-to-peer interactions for knowledge transfer. One such radical change in technology that researchers are continually working on is motivating collaborative learning and student interactions to improve their learning experiences. Collaborative Learning (CL), where students work in groups to achieve a specific learning objective, can facilitate a deep learning activity that promotes student participation. However, the potential of discussion forums is limited due to their unstructured nature in LMSs like Canvas.We propose and develop a structured discussion forum that can offer a platform to communicate and discuss problems and receive feedback, discuss solutions, and suggestions online. Students who participate in these discussion forums can benefit in multiple ways, including increased class preparedness and more active learning. The twofold objectives and outcomes include 1) analyzing discussion board data to reveal students’ interaction and their degree of participation in the course, and 2) developing a toolset to draw useful inferences from such collaboration networks. Specifically, our schema-based model can help students visualize the discussion board networks creating an engaged learning environment. Furthermore, the model can help draw valuable inferences of the patterns of student interactions and assess student participation and belonging in the course with greater precision.This paper demonstrates a schema-based discussion board model that can allow researchers to collect better-formatted discussion data and more reliable information about the posts, such as the type of posts and the relationships of each post with others. The reimagined discussion boards include the ability to classify discussion posts using various parameters, visualize the posts’ patterns of interactions, identify their relationships with other discussion posts, and precisely evaluate student participation in discussions to monitor the major topics of discussion. We believe that the result of increased participation in discussions with other students will have the effect of increasing students’ sense of belonging to the community of scholars.

Node-based social network analysis (SNA) techniques can be used to investigate the significance of actors that play central roles in social networks where the nodes represent people, teams or stakeholders and the links represent the communication, information exchange or collaboration between these nodes (actors). This research investigates how collaborative problem-solving can help in students' learning process. We analyzed the discussion board data collected from online student discussions on Canvas, a Learning Management System (LMS), in a CS1 course of a medium-sized US University. The discussion topics were classified as classroom experiences/learning, question/answers, opinions, and comments and were used to represent the patterns of interactions in the student discussion networks. Node-based network measures were then applied to unravel the students' interaction patterns to gain insights on students' progress. The textual analysis helps find the most challenging/debated topics in a particular course, analyze the leadership and team-based qualities of a group of students, and analyze patterns and trends in female student participation. The experimental analysis reveals that participation in online discussion forums has a positive impact on the students' grades; the study of interaction patterns exhibit similar insights. In conclusion, this research study validates that the analysis of structured discussions can provide useful insights into changes in student collaboration patterns over time and students' sense of belongingness for pedagogical benefits.

A variety of cyberlearning environments and online student collaboration techniques are used in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) courses to analyze and enhance academic performance. However, only a few research studies in the past have investigated the need for better modeling techniques of the unstructured discussion forums to enable measuring the influence of interactions in 'dynamically evolving' student collaboration networks as the course progresses. This paper focuses on discussing both current collaborative learning techniques and analyzing the need for developing an innovative network model involving more structured/goal-oriented discussion forums that portray active collaborative learning techniques. Such a structured collaborative network model can be used to investigate the impact that student collaborations have on knowledge acquisition, persistence and course outcomes. The research objective leads to the research question this study addresses on the potential of the unstructured and dynamically evolving discussion boards to measure the ability of the learners to communicate technical information effectively as the course progresses. The experimental analysis of the weighted and undirected temporal (time-varying or dynamic) student discussion network data and the inferences drawn from such an exploratory analysis have revealed the pedagogical need for and the utility of schema-based structured discussion boards. These structured discussions would enable a pragmatic study to analyze the changes in student collaboration patterns and belongingness.

Programming is a skill, often acquired through repeated practice and feedback. During traditional lectures, students not actively engaged in their own learning. It is imperative to pique students motivation and direct their focus on gaining the requisite knowledge. As the class size grows, instructors feedback is delayed that impacts student engagement and learning. Educational researchers have supported using web-based tools to help evaluate student work, provide timely feedback and increase the amount of time they spend improving their skills. Motivated by the previous work, our team has developed the SEP-CyLE (Software Engineering and Programming Cyber Learning Environment) - a cyber learning environment that contains digital learning content of software programming and testing concepts. SEP-CyLE incorporates collaborative learning, social networking and gamification-based learning engagement strategies (LESs) that has led to an improved motivation and understanding of programming concepts. This paper aims to assess the impact of different combinations of these LESs on student learning in the context of CS1 classrooms. We coordinated studies at two universities wherein different combination of LESs were utilized using SEP-CyLE in CS1 classrooms. We analyzed the impact of LESs on students' acquisition of programming concepts, their engagement and usage of SEP-CyLE. The pre and post test results indicated that the assorted LEs have shown a positive impact on student learning across all the institutions. The correlation results demonstrated that there is meaningful relationship between the LEs and the student performance.

Undergraduate programs in software engineering are relatively new. The first ABET accredited programs received accreditation in 2001. There are currently 31 ABET accredited software engineering programs worldwide with additional programs being added each year. In this session, panelists will discuss their experience starting new programs, developing curriculum, and navigating accreditation issues.

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In the design of critical systems and software, validation and verification (VV a subset must be chosen that maximizes the chances of mission success by reducing risk while meeting budget constraints. By explicitly modeling the contributions that various V&V activities make to reducing risks, and the costs of these activities, we are able to convert this to a classical optimization problem. We then use search, clustering and visualization algorithms to examine the large space of options.

Software management oracles often contain numerous subjective features. At each subjective point, a range of behaviors is possible. Stochastic simulation samples a subset of the possible behaviors. After many such stochastic simulations, the TAR2 treatment learner can find control actions that have (usually) the same impact despite the subjectivity of the oracle.

Accurate and complete requirements specifications are crucial for the design and implementation of high-quality software. Unfortunately, the articulation and verification of software system requirements remains one of the most difficult and error-prone tasks in the software development lifecycle. The use of formal methods, based on mathematical logic and discrete mathematics, holds promise for improving the reliability of requirements articulation and modeling. However, formal modeling and reasoning about requirements has not typically been a part of the software analyst's education and training, and because the learning curve for the use of these methods is nontrivial, adoption of formal methods has proceeded slowly. As a consequence, technology transfer is a significant issue in the use of formal methods. In this paper, several efforts undertaken at NASA aimed at increasing the accessibility of formal methods are described. These include the production of the following: two NASA guidebooks on the concepts and applications of formal methods, a body of case studies in the application of formal methods to the specification of requirements for actual NASA projects, and course materials for a professional development course introducing formal methods and their application to the analysis and design of software-intensive systems. In addition, efforts undertaken at two universities to integrate instruction on formal methods based on these NASA materials into the computer science and software engineering curricula are described.

How good is your teaching of Computer Science (CS)? If you asked this question of your Computer Science colleagues in an anonymous questionnaire. it would be quite common for most. if not all. to answer “average’”, “above average” or “excellent.” In questionnaires of this sort, it is typical for no one to identify themselves as “below average.”’ This cannot. of course, be true. So the question remains: How good is your teaching of Computer Science? A common answer to this question is obtained through student course evaluations The average response to a question like “HOW do you rate this professor’s teaching as compared to all others that you have had at this university?” is taken as the ultimate answer to this question. Student course evaluations do provide one perspective on our teaching abilities. The astute teacher realizes that this is just one perspective and that these numbers can be manipulated. Students frequently rate professors higher If they present “entertaining” lectures without regard to the amount of learning that may have occurred, Factors like the number of tests per semester can inordinately affect these judgments. There are other assessment techniques that provide different perspectives: peer evaluations, surveys of alumni satisfaction. questionnaires assessing employers’ satisfactions, etc Each of these has its own limitations: peer evaluations generally are the result of a few class visits, alumni satisfaction levels are difficult to ascribe to a particular faculty member, etc. The search for a more comprehensive, and hopefully more accurate, assessment methods has led us to an investigation and application ofteachinz v ortfolios. In this report we describe this effort that M now m Its third year. We will examine it from the perspective of five faculty members teaching computer science: a first year teacher. a teacher nearing tenure, two tenured faculty at the main campus. and a tenured teacher at a regional (two year) campus.

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Recently, both Miami University of Ohio and the Rochester Institute of Technology received NSF grants to develop undergraduate software engineering laboratories. While the general goals of the labs are similar, specific hardware and software selections were driven by differing curricular emphases and educational environments at the two institutions. This paper presents the distinctive characteristics of each school's program, discusses the influence of these features on the selection process, and describes our experiences to date with the resulting labs. The goal is to provide useful information guidance to others considering such facilities.

Testing of rule-based expert systems has become a high priority for many organizations as the use of such systems proliferates. Traditional software teting techniques apply to some components of rule-based systems, e.g., the inference engine. However, to structurally test the rule base component requires new techniques or adaptations of existing ones. This paper describes one such adaptation: an extension of data flow path selection in which a graphical representation of a rule base is defined and evaluated. This graphical form, called a logical path graph, captures logical paths through a rule base. These logical paths create precisely the abstractions needed in the testing process. An algorithm for the construction of logical path graphs are analyzed.

This paper describes an inservice retraining program for high school computer science teachers Since computer science teacher certification is a recent development, most of these teachers were trained in another field.This project consisted of a sequence of courses which taught the core principles of computer science to these teachers.