Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

7-2019

Abstract

Software architecture remains a difficult subject for learners to grasp and for educators to teach given its level of abstraction. On the other hand, case-based learning (CBL) is a popular teaching approach used across disciplines especially in business, medicine and law where students work in groups apply their knowledge to solve real-world case studies, or scenarios using their reasoning skills and existing theoretical knowledge. In this paper, we provide how we apply case-based learning to address the challenge in teaching a postgraduate software architecture course. Our learners are postgraduate students taking a master’s program in software engineering. We first describe our design of case-based learning for our software architecture course. We then analyse the survey ratings and learners’ profile to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed case-based design. These data are gathered from 9 class runs over a period of 8 years. Our analysis results show the effectiveness of our case-based design and significant relationships between this effectiveness to the learners’ years of working experiences and the number of learners. Key contributions in this paper are our proposed case-based design for software architecture and the analysis findings.

Keywords

Software architecture, curriculum design, case-based learning, pedagogical approach

Discipline

Higher Education | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Aberdeen, July 15-17

First Page

457

Last Page

463

ISBN

9781450368957

Identifier

10.1145/3304221.3319737

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3304221.3319737

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