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

TL;DR

This paper explores industry practitioners' perspectives on co-designing and delivering software engineering courses, highlighting motivations, experiences, and recommendations to improve future industry-academic collaborations.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into practitioners' motivations and experiences, addressing a gap in understanding industry involvement in course development.

Findings

Practitioners value real-world relevance and professional networking opportunities.

Ongoing support and clear expectations are crucial for successful collaborations.

Recommendations for sustainable industry-academic partnerships are proposed.

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.