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88<br />
COMPUTER<br />
EDUCATION<br />
The Computing Accreditation<br />
Commission specifies similar criteria<br />
for the accreditation of <strong>computing</strong><br />
programs.<br />
The broad field of <strong>computing</strong> cuts<br />
across disciplines in unique ways.<br />
Computing typically has a domain<br />
presence as a necessary tool rather<br />
than an area of detailed study—<br />
students must learn the fundamentals<br />
of <strong>computing</strong> to successfully<br />
apply it in all their work. Perhaps<br />
more important, they also must<br />
learn when a project has a <strong>computing</strong><br />
component that requires deeper<br />
expertise. This becomes an opportunity<br />
for educators to blend programs<br />
in <strong>computing</strong>, engineering, and other<br />
disciplines across an institution.<br />
MULTIDISCIPLINARY<br />
IN THE SMALL<br />
There are conflicting definitions<br />
for the terms multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary,<br />
and transdisciplinary,<br />
but educators shouldn’t get stuck on<br />
what to call it. Any approach that<br />
gets students interacting with material<br />
and people outside their own<br />
technical discipline, or in ways that<br />
are atypical for their discipline, is<br />
beneficial.<br />
Those who want to experiment<br />
with a multidisciplinary approach<br />
should start small within one of their<br />
courses by assigning exercises to<br />
students that require them to think<br />
from unfamiliar perspectives. In one<br />
course, I ask students to capture their<br />
thoughts on aspects of the course<br />
material in Haiku poems. Here’s an<br />
example of one called “Basic Principles”<br />
from a software engineering<br />
design course:<br />
Coupling, Cohesion<br />
Antagonistic forces<br />
Tradeoffs to be made.<br />
In that same course, I have students<br />
ask themselves about the<br />
structure shown in M.C. Escher’s<br />
Waterfall (www.mcescher.com/<br />
_____________________<br />
Gallery/recogn-bmp/LW439.jpg). For<br />
each of those questions about this<br />
illusionary structure, I ask them<br />
to pose an analog question when<br />
studying the design of a software<br />
system.<br />
This exercise isn’t what most<br />
readers may have in mind when<br />
they think multidisciplinary, but on<br />
a small scale that a faculty member<br />
can do in any course, it requires students<br />
to think using paradigms from<br />
other disciplines.<br />
The next step would be to have students<br />
enrolled in courses in different<br />
The students as well as the instructor must commit<br />
to the multidisciplinary approach.<br />
disciplines collaborate on projects.<br />
Individual faculty can coordinate this<br />
with little administrative support. As<br />
in all such instances, the students as<br />
well as the instructor must commit<br />
to the multidisciplinary approach: A<br />
project that serves as an extracurricular<br />
or small-credit activity for some<br />
students but counts as significant<br />
coursework for others won’t be very<br />
effective.<br />
MULTIDISCIPLINARY<br />
BY DESIGN<br />
If educators intend the multidisciplinary<br />
experience to satisfy<br />
accreditation requirements, it’s preferable<br />
to carefully design it into a<br />
program.<br />
All ABET-accredited software engineering<br />
programs require students to<br />
be able to work in one or more major<br />
application domains. However, what<br />
constitutes an application domain<br />
varies widely across programs (D.<br />
Bagert, “The Role of Application<br />
Domain Tracks in Software Engineering<br />
Programs,” Proc. 2006 Ann.<br />
Conf. Am. Soc. for Eng. Education,<br />
ACEE, 2006; http://soa.asee.org/paper/<br />
_______________________<br />
conference/paper-view.cfm?id=2832).<br />
Our software engineering program<br />
at the Rochester Institute of<br />
Technology (RIT) uses application<br />
domains as a vehicle to expose students<br />
to uses of <strong>computing</strong> outside<br />
their comfort zones. Each domain<br />
requires three courses, at least two<br />
of which must be taken from colleges<br />
other than our College of Computing<br />
and Information Sciences. This<br />
prevents the application domain<br />
from being simply a set of <strong>computing</strong><br />
electives.<br />
A cross-curriculum multidisciplinary<br />
approach involves designing<br />
a course, or course cluster, with<br />
multi-disciplinary interaction as a<br />
basic course principle. Educators<br />
must make the course material<br />
interesting and accessible to students<br />
from all the disciplines expected to<br />
participate.<br />
This can be challenging. With a<br />
computer engineering colleague, I<br />
created a cluster of three courses<br />
in real-time and embedded systems<br />
at RIT (J. Vallino and R.S.<br />
Czerniskowski, “Interdisciplinary<br />
Teaming as an Effective Method to<br />
Teach Real-Time and Embedded Systems<br />
Courses,” Proc. 2008 Workshop<br />
Embedded Systems Education, 2008,<br />
pp. 25-32). Even with closely related<br />
disciplines like software engineering<br />
and computer engineering, it<br />
was more difficult than we originally<br />
thought to keep the course interest<br />
balanced between the two.<br />
Educators must carefully select<br />
course projects to ensure that all<br />
disciplines contribute in different<br />
but equivalent ways. Some registration<br />
controls may be needed to<br />
help maintain balance across all<br />
disciplines. Ideally, these courses<br />
are team taught, but unless an<br />
institution’s teaching-load accounting<br />
easily accommodates that<br />
arrangement, it may have to settle<br />
for more traditional single-instructor<br />
teaching.<br />
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