Welcome to e-GradSE
International workshop on distance learning support for
postgraduate programmes in software engineering
22nd May 2011
Distance learning is becoming a pervasive option in many traditional universities all over the world. For postgraduate programmes in software engineering, in particular, there are opportunities created by distance learning that should be explored. Software engineering is an area where theory and practice have to come together. However, industrial practice is not always in line with theory. Postgraduate programmes in software engineering attract both young and mature and experienced part-time students. Thus, the strategies to conduct these programmes should fulfil the expectations of a divergent public as well as dealing with the challenges of understanding the state of practice and providing the means to advance the formation of future practitioners.
Resources available through distance education can contribute to narrowing the gap between theory and practice and to increasing communication between students, academics, and industrialists for more realistic case studies and/or experiments. Some possibilities are: to conceive expert communities based on social networks facilities; to facilitate student projects proposed by industry; to support the planning, development and replication of research experiments with practitioners; and to provide feedback to academics on the results of the application of their theory. In addition, it is important to provide means to establish flexible and high-quality educational content, capable of stimulating the learners (and instructors as well) and effectively contribute to their knowledge construction processes in software engineering learning scenarios.
The discussions should take into account relevant initiatives to establish graduate software engineering curricula to reflect on how to conciliate them with distance learning strategies.
The goals of the workshop are to join software engineering academics and industrialists to present contributions and discuss strategies for distance learning software engineering postgraduate education.
We are mainly looking for ideas that contribute to improving software engineering programs:
• by enhancing relations between academics and industry;
• by motivating (attracting) high quality people for postgraduate study in software engineering (both from industry and from young graduates);
• by identifying core abilities and skills to be developed in software engineering education;
• by creating strategies for software engineering experimental studies taking advantage of an interaction between academics and industry.