Investigating the higher education curriculum for sustainable software development

Abstract

Awareness and understanding of sustainability among students is commonly related to the environment aspect especially pollutions. However, the students are confused how to link the sustainability aspect with software development levels, such as software design and coding. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the sustainability dimensions’ awareness among the higher education students. It investigates the sustainability dimensions in the course curriculum of computer sciences (CS), information technology (IT) and software engineering (SE). The survey among CS, IT and SE students at the Saudi university in the western and southern regions of the kingdom is conducted in order to investigate their awareness regarding sustainable development. A total of 318 related students from various public sector universities in the western and southern regions of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) contributed by surveys of their awareness towards sustainable development. The results indicates that 71% of them are unaware of the term of sustainable development, only 17% of them know the basic definition of sustainable development, and 12% of them have an idea of how sustainable development is related to the software development. Furthermore, it indicates that the current curriculum does not sufficiently cover specific subjects about sustainable development. As a results, the educational institutes and universities have to provide sustainability awareness and understanding among the students and thus they have to develop their vision, policy, teaching strategies, research objectives, and curriculum.