1996 Archives for
CPSC451 Practical Software Engineering

Contents

This web contains the teaching materials and project reports for the 1996 implementation of the course Practical Software Engineering designed to introduce senior computer science students to industrial aspects of software engineering.

The only changes to the material have been the removal of students' email addresses since many of these will be out of date, and it is not appropriate for the email lists for the course to be used again. If you look at the student projects then remember that the student names were usually in the form of "mailto" addresses and that there were links to mail to the entire customer group, supplier group, teaching assistant and instructor.

The course may be accessed through its home page for 1996.

Purpose

This web has three major purposes:-

A Resource for Future Software Engineering Courses
In collaborative learning it is not only the other students in the course who are collaborators but also those in past courses who have already made contributions and those in future courses who will build on what is achieved in the current course. There is a community of learning that builds up over many years, and the web is an excellent means for supporting the continuity of this community.

A Portfolio for the Students
Portfolio-based assessment is important in allowing a student's work to be evaluated fully and not just reduced to a simple "grade." This web of material remains available to the students who created it so that they may show others what they have achieved.

An Example of Collaborative Learning
Modern information technology may be used to support collaborative learning in an organisational setting that replicates many aspects of real-world situations to produce a rich learning environment. We have learned much from the work of others, and hope that this web will contribute to the development of increasingly valuable collaborative learning environments.

Projects--Collaborative Learning Using the Web

For those particularly interested in the way the web was used by the students to manage their collaboration, the instructions are directly available. The project groups extended these, inventing many other ways of collaborating through the web.

Note that the web was used directly with no special tools to support collaboration. The students used their individual computer accounts to put relevant materials on the web, and then linked to one another to develop an integrated site. This generated a very complex web in which, for example, screen dumps in one account were used to illustrate a manual in another, but it allowed the content to be controlled by the individuals who assumed specific roles in the projects.

The student projects may be accessed directly through the following links:-

mildred@cpsc.ucalgary.ca 30-Oct-96

Software Engineering Research Network