A constructivist redesign of a graduate-level cs course to address content obsolescence and student motivation

Abstract

The last decade has seen a rising popularity of active learning methodologies in Computer Science (CS), empowering students and developing their soft skills as well as their technical knowledge. In parallel, the speed of technological obsolescence also increased, creating challenges for teachers to keep their course content fresh and up to date. In this paper, we present a constructivist redesign of a Graduate-level laboratory course in Web Service Design and Engineering that leverages latent pockets of student knowledge to tackle these challenges through Learning by Teaching (LbT). We illustrate how such redesign was planned, deployed and evaluated, highlighting the guiding role of teachers in the process and discussing how this approach was able to solve the problem of keeping content updated while broadening both content and tools students were exposed to. Furthermore, we will discuss how the additional motivation stemming from their empowerment allowed students not only to perform more work compared to a lecturebased implementation, but also to perceive it in the end as a lesser load.