Learning Design for Software Engineering Courses

Itana M. S. Gimenes

, Leonor Barroca

, Ellen F. Barbosa

and Edson A. Oliveira Júnior

Departamento de Informática, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Maringá-PR, Brazil

Department of Computing, The Open University, Milton Keynes, U.K.

ICMC, Universidade de São Paulo, São Carlos-SP, Brazil

Keywords: Learning Design, Software Engineering, Course Design.

Abstract: This paper presents a customization of a learning design approach, OULDI, to designing and implementing

Software Engineering courses. We propose an iterative process for the application of

the OULDI views. This process starts with a course map view and follows a series of steps that ends with

the evaluation of the design reflecting on the balance of the proposed activities. A case study is presented in

which two institutions were involved in the design and implementation of an experimental software

engineering course. Feedback from students, designers and lecturers was collected to support the validation

of the design and implementation of the course. This showed that learning design, with the process proposed

here, is a feasible approach for the design of software engineering courses.

1 INTRODUCTION

Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

resources that have been used predominantly in

distance education to improve the experience of the

learner are now available at lower costs and finding

their way into many educational contexts. This wide

use calls for strategies to integrate ICT resources in

the learning process that take into account different

educational modes and different domains.

Education has always required planning and

design; however, in a face-to-face context, learning

relies often on implicit practice. The widespread use

of ICT and the opening of new educational practices,

for example, the integration of distance education

elements and of open educational resources, make a

stronger demand on support for preparation and

planning. Learning design is an approach that

supports teachers and designers to make informed

decisions about course activities, resources,

technologies and pedagogical approaches (Conole,

2013). Learning design can be used at different

levels of granularity, from the representation of

learning activities that are performed by different

actors in the context of a course, to the planning of

curriculum for whole programmes (Koper, 2006).

When learning design is applied to develop a course,

it allows for the sharing, discussion, validation and

evolution of the course designs; when applied to

activities it will facilitate the discussion of their

learning outcomes and pedagogical approaches.

Both the process of planning and the product of that

planning can be made explicit through design

representations supported by methods and tools.

In the design of a software engineering course,

pedagogical decisions are influenced by the nature

of professional activities. These require specific

skills that can be strengthened by the activities, and

the experiences that students engage with. The

teaching of technical skills needs to be integrated

with that of soft skills such as: cooperation and

effective communication, leadership, negotiation,

feasibility analysis, and adaptation to new models

and technologies. Learning design can facilitate this

integration through planning activities that promote

the dialogue between learners and educators.

Learning design has similarities with software

engineering in terms of making abstractions and

models explicit before implementation (Caeiro-

rodríguez et al., 2010). The core of a software

engineering course is about learning to extract

requirements from stakeholders and the real world

and making them explicit in a design language and

in code (Sommerville, 2010). One such language,

the Unified Modelling Language (UML) (OMG,

2013), has also been referred to as a design tool in

learning design (Dalziel, 2012; Grainne Conole,

2013). Both software designers and educators rely

241

M. S. Gimenes I., Barroca L., F. Barbosa E. and A. Oliveira Júnior E..

Learning Design for Software Engineering Courses.

DOI: 10.5220/0004838002410249

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 241-249

ISBN: 978-989-758-020-8

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

extensively on their prior experience and context for

development (Wilson, 2007). This highlights

commonalities between learning and software

engineering design techniques that should be

exploited further.

Several research projects developed tools to

support learning design (Koper, 2006; Dalziel,

2012). The Open University Learning Design

Initiative (OULDI) is such a project that developed a

set of concepts together with computer-supported

tools (Cross et al., 2012). It supports explicit course

design representations and provides mechanisms to

foster sharing of material and collaboration amongst

course team members.

In this paper, we propose a customisation of

OULDI for software engineering education. This

customisation includes an explicit design process

conceived to organise the development of the views

proposed by OULDI. We applied this customisation

to the design and implementation of an Experimental

Software Engineering (ESE) course, in the context

of a master program in Computer Science.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2

gives the background for this work. Section 3

presents the customised OULDI process. Section 4

describes a case study in which an ESE course was

designed and implemented by two institutions in

Brazil with the collaboration of the Open University,

UK. Section 5 discusses the feedback from

designers, lecturers and students. Section 6 presents

conclusions and further work.

2 BACKGROUND

Learning design as a research field has emerged in

the last 10 years mainly from researchers in Europe

and Australia (Koper 2006; Grainne Conole, 2013;

Dalziel, 2012). It has a strong emphasis on making

the design process and artefacts explicit and

shareable. Design in education is not a new field

though, and instructional design has been a well-

established discipline for several decades (Eckel,

1993). However, learning design takes a broader

approach, moving away from the production of

instructions derived from learning goals, towards a

more learner centred approach that is dynamic and

takes into account a supporting environment and all

stakeholders involved in planning the learning

process; it builds also on research on learning

sciences and design languages.

The learning design process and representation

can be considered as pedagogically neutral as they

can be used to represent the activities, tools and

roles of any pedagogical approach. In this sense,

learning design is more flexible than instructional

design; it provides a framework where different

pedagogical approaches can be implemented.

Our work is based on OULDI (Conole, 2013;

Cross et al., 2012). It supports the design of courses

with views, guidelines and tools. It allows the

structured design of activities and their articulation

with the learning outcomes, content and tools in

such a way that the educators can envision the

overall course to make decisions and carry out

necessary adjustments before proceeding to

production. It also provides a set of support tools,

namely: CompendiumLD (CompendiumLD, 2008)

which is a workflow design tool that contains special

templates for course designs; and Cloudworks

(Conole and Cuvel, 2009), that provides an open

public space to which users can contribute, and

where they can discuss learning and teaching

designs and experiences. We chose to work with

OULDI because of the set of support tools and its

ease of use for higher education and for designers

who are familiar with technology. Approaches, such

as CADMOS (Katsamani and Retalis, 2008), LDSE

(Laurillard et al., 2011) and LAMS (Dalziel, 2009)

provide similar resources, but are more self-

contained environments which would be difficult to

customize. Their tools are also more directed to

school teachers; our purpose is to support software

engineering educators who are used to work with

workflow techniques similar to the approach

supported by CompendiumLD. We are aware that

the OULDI has evolved and added more support

mechanisms like the course features cards (Cross et

al., 2012) but we did not incorporated them at this

stage.

3 LEARNING DESIGN IN

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

OULDI (Cross et al., 2012) provides a set of

shareable artefacts of design that represents a course

around five conceptual views. These views are: (i) a

course map which represents an overview of the

course; (ii) a course dimension, which gives

detail on the nature of the course (collaboration,

assessment, user content, etc); (iii) a pedagogy

profile which indicates the learners’

participation in the designed types of activities; (iv)

the learning outcomes map which links

these to activities and assessment; and (v) the task

swimlane which relates tasks to resources and

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tools. OULDI promotes an iterative approach of

problem identification, solutions development, use,

evaluation and refinement, but does not define an

explicit design process. With our software

engineering background and expertise we felt the

need for a more detailed process to the application of

OULDI to the design of courses in the software

engineering domain. We detailed a process where

the OULDI views are iteratively developed in three

phases, as shown in Figure 1, and described below.

Figure 1: OULDI adapted process.

Determine Course Objectives: produces

the course map view which is the first overview of

the course. This helps educators think about the

design of the course around four aspects: (i)

Guidance & Support; (ii) Content & Experience; (iii)

Communication & Collaboration; and, (iv)

Reflection & Demonstration. Inputs to this phase are

the course context and the ideas and objectives

discussed by the course team.

Develop Course: develops the sequence of

course activities generating the Learning Outcomes

(LOs) and task swimlane view. Activities can be

developed at hierarchical levels starting from

composed activities and going down to atomic tasks.

Activities and tasks can be associated with roles,

tools and course material.

Evaluate & Plan: reflects on the balance of

the activity types of the course to evaluate the design

and evolve it. The designers have to establish the

amount of each type of activity and the amount of

assessment. This information produces the pedagogy

profile and course dimension views. The pedagogy

profile classifies the activities into: (i) Assimilative,

attending and understanding content; (ii) Finding

and handling information, gathering and classifying

resources or manipulating data; (iii) Interactive and

adaptive, using modeling or simulation software;

(iv) Communicative, carrying out dialogic activities

(e.g., group-based discussions); (v) Productive,

constructing an experimental study; (vi)

Experiential, practicing skills in the context of an

experiment; and, (vii) Assessment, performing

formative and summative evaluations.

Each phase produces a set of outputs which can

be used in the next phase and refined iteratively. The

availability of these artefacts facilitates the process

of collaborative design of the learning experience.

4 CASE STUDY:

THE ESE COURSE

The design of the ESE course was carried out taking

into account the context of a master’s program in

Computer Science and a Brazilian multi-institutional

project, funded by PROCAD/CAPES

(www.capes.gov.br), whose objectives included the

offer of collaborative courses. In Brazil, master’s

programmes are research driven programs where

students engage with the development of new ideas

and the proposal of new approaches (Barroca and

Gimenes, 2013).

ESE is a subarea of software engineering

focusing on the evidence of validity of methods and

tools (Kitchenham et al., 2002). It is an important

topic to teach in postgraduate computer science (and

software engineering) programs geared to research;

students need to provide evidence of the feasibility

of proposed new methods and tools.

4.1 Course Design

The design of the ESE course started with the

Determine Course Objectives phase by

understanding the course context and educators’s

intentions and constraints. An ESE course teaches

principles and techniques for evaluation applied to

software engineering. It should instigate students to

discuss collectively the value and means of

evaluating research methods, tools and experiments.

Students need to learn a well-defined process

ranging from the planning of an experiment to its

packaging for replication (Wohlin, 2000). This

process should be supported by statistical methods to

guide data collection and analysis. The course has to

make sure that the theoretical principles are well

understood, and that there are opportunities for

learning and practising the development and

replication of practical studies. Group work should

be encouraged and supported. It is important to learn

that the participation of individuals with an

appropriate profile in the experiments is valuable to

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enhance the meaning of the collected data, thus

improving confidence in the results. It is often the

case that experiments involve more undergraduate

and graduate students than practitioners. Therefore,

the course should seek to involve external

participants, mainly from industry, in the execution

of the experiments. Students should be aware of

existing tools to select and use in their experimental

studies. The students should learn how to package

their experiments for replication. As a result of the

phase Determine Course Objectives the

ESE Course map view was produced as described in

Table 1.

Table 1: ESE Course map view.

The Develop Course phase designed the course

activities taking as input the ESE course map view.

It produced the LOs view of the ESE course in

hierarchical levels as shown in Figures 2 and 3.

The 1

level of the LOs view consists of three

activities: Main Activities; Discussions;

and Keep a Network of Participants.

Each activity is associated with roles, resources and

tools which are represented in Figure 2 with the

respective CompendiumLD icons. The activity

Discussions is designed to aggregate students

into groups to exchange ideas and carry out course

assessments. The activity Keep a Network of

Participants is designed to maintain a network

of people who can act as participants in the course

experiments.

The Main activities were further detailed,

in a 2

level, as shown in Figure 3. It shows lower

granularity activities which compose the core of the

Figure 2: LOs view of the ESE course – 1st level.

course. In this figure we can see four

CompendiumLD stencils: (i) What is to be

learnt marking the line of LOs; (ii) Student

activity for course activities; (iii) Media and

tools for tools used in the activities; and (iv)

Learning output for Summative Assessments

(SA) produced by the activities. The core activities

are: Brainstorm the evaluation of

software techniques and tools; Study

concepts and principles; Replicate

an experiment; and, Develop an

experiment. These activities were decomposed to

atomic tasks. As an example, Figure 4 shows the

task swimlane view of the Develop an

Experiment activity from Figure 3. It contains

atomic tasks associated with their respective

Formative Assessments (FA).

The Evaluate & Plan phase has iteratively

produced several versions of the pedagogy profile

which were used to adjust and evolve the course

design until the course team was satisfied with the

distribution of activities. The fact that the course

design is explicit and shareable allows designers to

discuss and propose improvements, and facilitates

the iterative refinement process of collaborative

design.

The final balance of activity types was

represented in a graph with: 10%-Assimilative;

3%-Finding and handling information; 45%-

Communicative; 35%-Productive; 0%-Experiential;

7%-Assessment. There are no Experiential activities

because the students were not supposed to

participate in didactic experiments; Assessment

activities have a low contribution as the course team

counted the deliverables under Productive activities;

the contribution of Communicative tasks is high as

the course was designed to stimulate interaction

between the institutions and the work groups.

The course dimension view, as it is a crosscut view,

does not add extra information and it is not used

here.

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Figure 3: LOs view of the ESE course – 2nd level.

Figure 4: Task swimlane for Develop an experiment.

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4.2 Course Implementation

The ESE course was implemented within the

master’s program in Computer Science of the

Universidade Estadual de Maringá (DIN/UEM,

http://www.din.uem.br) and the Universidade de São

Paulo (ICMC/USP, http://www.icmc.usp.br).

Delivering a multi-institutional course within

research degree programs in Brazil is an innovative

initiative which fosters collaboration between

institutions that provide these programs. The use of

OULDI was important to facilitate and support the

collaboration between the institutions both in the

planning and in the implementation of the course.

The process proposed here, also facilitated this joint

development.

Twenty-four students were enrolled in the

course, nine from DIN/UEM and fifteen from

ICMC/USP. The third and fourth authors were the

lecturers in ICMC/USP and DIN/UEM, respectively.

All authors participated actively in the course

design, following the proposed phases of the OULDI

customisation.

The implementation of the course followed the

Guidance & Support designed in the course map

view (Table 1). There were difficulties in the

implementation of Google as the support learning

environment. Moodle was chosen, as Google Apps

for Education did not have a front end to encapsulate

its tools. Also, students and institutions were more

familiar with Moodle.

The course was implemented in a blended

instruction mode. It was scheduled with the

same timetable in both institutions and used the

same Moodle site. The support materials were

selected collaboratively and made available to

students. Classes were intended to be alternated

between the institutions and transmitted through

video-conference. However, there were technical

problems and, in the end, the same material was

used but the classes were delivered locally by the

lecturers in each institution. Students in each

institution teamed up in groups of three. The final

presentations of the experiments were successfully

transmitted by video-conference and students and

lecturers could interact to discuss the projects.

There were no changes to the designed LOs and

task swimlane (Figures 2, 3 and 4), but one activity,

Replication, was carried out differently, in each

institution, due to individual decision of the local

lecturers. At DIN/UEM, each team planned and

replicated the same experiment, whereas at

ICMC/USP all the students were participants in the

replication of one experiment conducted by a

researcher with the lecturer’s support.

In the end, the Keep a Network of

Participants was not implemented due to the

time constraints of the course and the lack of

involvement of the external community. We think

this is an activity that should have been planned and

developed by the institutions before the course

started.

5 DISCUSSION

Results of the ESE course design presented in this

paper are discussed from the perspectives of both

designers/lecturers and students. One questionnaire

was given to students and another to the

designers/lecturers; both contained 12 questions

regarding course design and implementation, content

and structure, didactic and technical resources,

learning environment, communication and

collaboration issues, among others, as shown in the

Appendix.

In summary, designers and lecturers made the

following remarks:

 Course design and implementation: They agreed

that the OULDI process was interesting and

effective both in designing and evolving the

course. It provided the course with representations

that were used to share ideas within the design

team as well as to guide the development of the

learning environment for the course. In particular,

the course map view helped to think in advance

about the course goals and the main structure.

Also, the Evaluation & Plan phase was crucial in

planning better the course activities. The class

schedule was followed accordingly and only small

adjustments had to be made, mainly due to

technical problems.

 Communication and collaboration: Skype

meetings supported communication and

collaboration effectively amongst

designers/lecturers. However, a more integrated

environment both for designing and collaboration

is necessary.

 Virtual learning environment: They agreed that

Moodle provided a complete set of resources to be

used during the course which were easy to use.

 Technical issues: Contrary to what is published

that technical resources for distance/blended

learning are widely available at low cost, this is

still not a reality in many places; both institutions

involved in the ESE course had to set up the

environments for video-conference. In particular,

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DIN/UEM struggled to set up this environment

which could only operate satisfactorily by the end

of the course.

The students made the following observations:

 Course structure and content: 68% agreed that the

content was adequate and well organized in the

learning environment.

 Pedagogical resources: the wiki was the most used

resource (59%), followed by the calendar (54%),

the forum (50%) and email (36%), showing,

therefore, a balance in the use of pedagogical

resources.

 Communication and collaboration: Despite the

results in the usage of pedagogical resources, there

were problems regarding the effectiveness of

communication and collaboration. At the start,

there was some resistance in using the resources

available. In particular, it was difficult to engage

students in forum discussions. Many activities

involving communication and collaboration were

proposed as an attempt to encourage them to take

part in the discussions. As a result, interesting

questions and discussions were gradually arising in

the forum, in the wiki, and by email. In the end,

46% of students considered the use of didactic

resources effective, 32% were neutral and 22%

thought they were of little or no effect.

 Technical resources: As discussed before, the use

of technical resources, especially the video-

conference environment was the most criticised

aspect of the course; 50% of the students evaluated

this item as “bad” or “very bad”.

 Motivation, autonomy and self-organization: 82%

of the students considered themselves as motivated

or highly motivated during the course. Also, 68%

of students considered they were autonomous and

self-organized to study the theory and perform the

suggested practical activities.

 Interaction between students: 95% of students

considered the interaction amongst students in the

same institution, as “very high”. This is mainly

because most students also acted as “participants”

of the experiments designed by the other teams.

Students organised themselves in this way.

However, when considering interaction amongst

students of different institutions, 77% of them

evaluated it as “very poor”. Only in the final

presentations of the experiments, were students of

ICMC/USP and DIN/UEM able to interact and

discuss the results of their experiments.

 Open comments: Students showed a positive

attitude towards the ESE course, especially

regarding the pedagogical approach used. The

negative aspect pointed out by almost all of them

was the duration of the course. Instead of two

hours/week, they suggested at least three

hours/week for designing and conducting the

experiment.

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER

WORK

This paper proposed and applied a customisation of

a learning design approach, to a specific domain,

that of software engineering. Overall, the learning

design approach, and in particular OULDI, proved to

be effective to design software engineering courses.

In addition, it proved to be efficient in the support of

the collaboration between Brazilian institutions in

the ESE course design and implementation.

Although there are other learning design

approaches in the literature (Koper, 2006; Dalziel,

2012), we are not aware of work being done of their

customisation to software engineering. The

specificity of the need for professional engagement,

the knowledge and experience of design, the

familiarity with workflow techniques and tools, and

the engagement with the open movement make

software engineering education an area that calls for

such customisation.

The population of the case study was small, but

of a typical size for postgraduate courses. We are

aware of the threats to validity regarding the need of

its application to a larger and more independent

group of designers and students. We intend to evolve

the ESE course and the OULDI process, with

different groups of designers and students.

This paper carried out an experiment with

OULDI and detailed comparison of the same

experiment with other methods was out of scope.

Further work is needed to comparatively assess and

customise other LD methods to SE.

Further work also includes the design of a

support environment for the collaborative design of

software engineering courses; including mechanisms

to access and produce open educational resources.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to CAPES for the funding of Itana

Gimenes postdoctoral research at the Open

University, UK and the project PROCAD 191/2007.

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APPENDIX

Questionnaire for the lecturers of the ESE

module

Questionnaire for the students of the ESE

module

**All answers to questions have discrete

alternatives ranging from 1 (very bad) to five (very

good).

1. How do you assess the module’s learning

outcomes?

2. How do you assess the planning of the module?

(Teaching plan, workload, modules’ support

materials, bibliography, media resources,

implementation of the projects, etc.)

3. How do you assess the organisation of the

resources available in the module’s Virtual

Learning Environment (VLE)?

4. How do you assess the communication between

students and lecturers? (Consider also

communication using the forum, by email, etc.)

5. Which means of communication were used?

(Select one answer for each [Forum, Wiki, E-

mail, Calendar]: 1 for least used, 4 for most

used).

6. How do you assess the effectiveness of the use

of resources available in the module’s VLE?

(Forum, wiki, email and calendar).

7. How do you assess the videoconferencing

sessions that took place?

8. How do you assess the students’ performance in

the assessment?

9. How do you assess the students’ independence

and self-discipline during the study of this

module?

10. How do you assess the communication amongst

students in your institution doing this module?

11. How do you assess the communication amongst

students of involved institutions (DIN/UEM and

ICMC/USP) doing this module?

12. How do you assess the collaboration amongst

all lecturers involved in this module?

13. Other comments (add whatever you consider

important).

**All answers to questions have discrete

alternatives ranging from 1 (very bad) to five (very

good)

1. How do you assess the organisation of the

resources available in the module’s Virtual

Learning Environment (VLE)?

2. How do you assess the communication between

students and lecturers? (Consider also

communication using the forum, by email, etc.)

3. Which means of communication were used?

(Select one answer for each [Forum, Wiki, E-

mail, Calendar]: 1 for least used, 4 for most

used).

4. How do you assess the effectiveness of the use

of resources available in the module’s VLE?

(Forum, wiki, email and calendar)

5. How do you assess the videoconferencing

sessions that took place?

6. How do you assess your performance in the

assessment?

7. How do you assess your independence and

self-discipline during the study of this module?

8. How do you assess your motivation and

learning?

9. How do you assess the communication amongst

students in your institution doing this module?

10. How do you assess the communication amongst

students of the involved institutions (DIN/UEM

and ICMC/USP) doing this module?

11. How do you assess the skills and competence of

your lecturers?

12. How do you assess the collaboration amongst

all lecturers involved in this module?

13. Other comments (add whatever you consider

important).

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