Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

5-2023

Abstract

Cloud Computing skills have been increasing in demand. Many software engineers are learning these skills and taking cloud certification examinations to be job competitive. Preparing undergraduates to be cloud-certified remains challenging as cloud computing is a relatively new topic in the computing curriculum, and many of these certifications require working experience. In this paper, we report our experiences designing a course with experiential learning to prepare our computing undergraduates to take the cloud certification. We adopt a university project-based experiential learning framework to engage industry partners who provide project requirements for students to develop cloud solutions and an experiential risk learning model to design the course contents. We prepare these students to take on the Amazon Web Services Solution Architect - Associate (AWS-SAA) while doing the course. We do this over 3 semester terms and report our findings before and after our design with experiential learning. We are motivated by the students’ average 93% passing rates over the terms. Even when the certification is taken out of the graded components, we still see an encouraging 89% participation rate. The quantitative feedback shows increased ratings across the survey questions compared to before experiential learning. We acknowledge concerns about the students’ heavy workload and increased administrative efforts for the faculty members. We summarise our approach with actionable weekly topics, activities and takeaways. We hope this experience report can help other educators design cloud computing content and certifications for computing students in software engineering.

Keywords

cloud computing, cloud certification, experiential learning, undergraduate

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET), Melbourne, Australia, May 14-20

First Page

46

Last Page

57

ISBN

9798350322590

Identifier

10.1109/ICSE-SEET58685.2023.00011

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Los Alamitos, CA

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEET58685.2023.00011

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