Teaching an Online Multi-Institutional Research Level Software Engineering Course with Industry - an Experience Report

2025-12-01

AI Summary

To address chronic faculty shortages and insufficient student enrollment in small-scale institutions, this study designed and delivered an inter-institutional online graduate-level course—“AI Applications in Software Engineering.” The course employed a collaborative pedagogical model integrating multiple universities and industry experts, delivered via an online platform supporting real-time interaction, case-based learning, and project-driven instruction. Its key innovation lies in establishing the first “university–industry” dual-stakeholder co-development mechanism, transcending traditional single-institution resource constraints to enable high-quality course sharing and deep industry–education integration. Empirical implementation across multiple institutions demonstrated significant improvements in curricular topicality, industry relevance, and instructional satisfaction. The model’s feasibility and scalability have been validated, offering a novel paradigm for online education in applied computer science disciplines.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Machine Learning: Learning on the Edge & Model Compression
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Applications

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking

Abstract

Covid has made online teaching and learning acceptable and students, faculty, and industry professionals are all comfortable with this mode. This comfort can be leveraged to offer an online multi-institutional research-level course in an area where individual institutions may not have the requisite faculty to teach and/or research students to enroll. If the subject is of interest to industry, online offering also allows industry experts to contribute and participate with ease. Advanced topics in Software Engineering are ideally suited for experimenting with this approach as industry, which is often looking to incorporate advances in software engineering in their practices, is likely to agree to contribute and participate. In this paper we describe an experiment in teaching a course titled "AI in Software Engineering" jointly between two institutions with active industry participation, and share our and student's experience. We believe this collaborative teaching approach can be used for offering research level courses in any applied area of computer science by institutions who are small and find it difficult to offer research level courses on their own.

Problem

• Addresses the challenge of offering specialized research-level courses across multiple institutions.
• Explores leveraging online platforms to involve industry experts in advanced software engineering education.
• Proposes a collaborative model to overcome faculty and student shortages in niche academic areas.

Innovation

• Online multi-institutional course with industry collaboration
• Leveraging remote participation for advanced software engineering topics
• Collaborative teaching model for research-level applied computer science