Switzerland Serbia Slovakia partnership for Innovative teaching curricula, methods and infrastructures for computer science and software engineering

SCOPES
Start Year: 
2015
End Year: 
2018

The main goal of the project is to innovate the teaching infrastructures at partner institutions based on the knowledge and experience of individual partners. This goal will be achieved by transferring and integrating content, best practices, methods and existing learning support software systems in the context of selected Informatics courses. In the long term, we expect to build a close cooperation in this area, which will lead to updating the computer science and software engineering curricula taught at the partner institutions.
The infrastructure – teaching methods, course content, and software support systems – used at each partner institution was designed to address different challenges and evolved in response to specific local conditions. In this project we aim to transfer our know-how embedded in several learning support software systems, and build a long-term cooperation through the integration and cross-utilization of these systems.
In particular, we include learning support systems that enable interactive lectures that improve focus and engagement of students as well as increase teacher awareness of student progress; automatic assessment systems that enable thorough testing and feedback on student’s solutions, and social support systems that enable increased engagement of students with teachers and more in-depth communication. Several of the software support systems used at the partner institutions are research- oriented and developed in-house. By sharing experience and best practices in using the software systems across all institutions we can significantly improve institutional capacity in teaching at each partner institution, while also providing common ground for future research in the area of technology-enhanced learning support systems.
Through different work efforts organized in work packages, we aim to innovate: teaching methods, material and content used in selected computer science and software engineering courses and transfer best practices in the software infrastructures used at each partner institution. We focus on thematically common courses for programming and software development offered at each institution: introductory programming and programming fundamentals courses, and software and/or web engineering courses. We plan to improve selected courses, their content, activities and methods of delivery, with focus mainly on the practical exercises and lab sessions, which significantly increase the quality of educational outcomes. The working language in this project is English, but we will also address local considerations relating to the translation to the local languages used in teaching at the partner institutions.
Using teaching infrastructure that is based on common technology-enhanced learning software systems and common learning content within these support systems, we are building a foundation for a long-term institutional partnership both in teaching (using the common infrastructure) and research (analyzing data acquired using the infrastructure across the three institutions).

The project is a collaboration of the USI Faculty of Informatics with the University of Novi Sad (UNSPMF) and the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava (STUBA)