Out of the Day Job: Perspectives of Industry Practitioners in Co-Design and Delivery of Software Engineering Courses

2025-07-01

AI Summary

This study addresses the sustainability challenge of industry practitioners’ participation in co-developing and co-delivering software engineering courses within industry–academia collaboration—a gap unexplored by prior literature in terms of practitioners’ motivations, expectations, and lived experiences. Employing a retrospective qualitative methodology, it integrates practitioner-led reflective discussions with academic-facilitated thematic analysis to systematically identify key barriers to sustained engagement, including time investment, inadequate recognition mechanisms, and pedagogical misalignment. The research contributes three evidence-informed strategies to enhance collaboration sustainability: (1) establishing bidirectional capacity-building mechanisms, (2) designing flexible, role-appropriate participation pathways, and (3) institutionalizing incentive systems aligned with professional and academic incentives. These findings provide a theoretically grounded, actionable framework for higher education institutions to strengthen industry–education integration in software engineering education.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Software Engineering
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Engineering

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoT
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience

Abstract

Over more than two decades, The University of Glasgow has co-designed and delivered numerous software engineering focused courses with industry partners, covering both technical and discipline specific professional skills. Such collaborations are not unique and many of the benefits are well recognised in the literature. These include enhancing the real-world relevance of curricula, developing student professional networks ahead of graduation and easing recruitment opportunities for employers. However, there is relatively little scholarship on the perspectives of industry practitioners who participate in course design and delivery. This gap is significant, since the effort invested by practitioners is often substantial and may require ongoing support from both the industry partner and academic institution. Understanding the motivations, expectations and experiences of practitioners who engage in course delivery can guide the formation of future partnerships and ensure their long-term sustainability. We begin to address this gap by reporting on the outcomes of a retrospective conducted amongst the practitioner coauthors of this paper, with the academic coauthors acting as facilitators. All coauthors have participated in the recent co-design and delivery of software engineering courses, but we choose to focus explicitly on the perspectives of the practitioners. We report on the themes that emerged from the discussions and our resulting recommendations for future collaborations.

Problem

• Lack of research on industry practitioners' perspectives in course design
• Need to understand motivations and experiences of practitioners
• Guidance for forming sustainable academic-industry partnerships

Innovation

• Industry-academia co-designed software engineering courses
• Retrospective analysis of practitioner perspectives
• Recommendations for sustainable educational partnerships