Session T4G 978-1-61284-469-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE October 12 - 15, 2011, Rapid City, SD 41 st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T4G-1 Connecting Reality with Theory - An Approach for Creating Integrative Industry Case Studies in the Software Engineering Curriculum Joe Bolinger, Michael Herold, Rajiv Ramnath, Jayashree Ramanathan The Ohio State University, bolinger@cse.ohio-state.edu, herold@cse.ohio-state.edu, ramnath@cse.ohio-state.edu, jayram@cse.ohio-state.edu Abstract - Case studies have been successfully integrated into a wide variety of educational contexts and disciplines. Today, case studies are increasingly accepted as valuable teaching tools in science and engineering curriculums to complement the underlying theory of the field. Well-articulated cases can reinforce abstract concepts, demonstrate the nature of real client interactions, and showcase the relevance of soft skills to students that lack significant practical experience. However, assembling and delivering quality case studies to students requires a great deal of practical disciplinary knowledge, and a careful alignment of the case content and delivery style with curricular objectives, course learning outcomes, and the overarching institutional format. In this paper, we summarize our experience with an approach for constructing case study teaching materials that are integrative and deep in content, but also carefully aligned to the core principles and format of a senior-level software engineering course. Our approach ensures that the cases are complex enough to retain their realism and intrinsic appeal, while mirroring the format and objectives of the course such that the cases reinforce key points in a familiar and consistent fashion to the students. Index Terms – Case study, case study teaching, creating case studies, software engineering education. INTRODUCTION Case studies have a rich history in many educational settings and their relevance to science and engineering disciplines has been steadily growing [1]-[3]. The depth and practical relevance of a well-presented case serves as a good complement to the relatively dense theory that is a necessary component of an engineering curriculum, and it can help facilitate more interactive teaching methods and active styles of learning [4]. Nonetheless, taking a history of real world events and repackaging them into a set of useful classroom materials is a difficult art form to master, which requires both disciplinary and educational knowledge and skills. Despite the prevalence of example case studies and high-level guidelines for authors of new cases [2, 3, 5]-[10], there are few prescriptive methods for ensuring that cases are created in a manner that is tightly integrated with the core concepts and principles of a course. The most skilled storytellers have a keen ability to tailor their tales to fit their audience, and good cases should leverage this quality to the extent possible. The most compelling cases are not pulled off a library shelf or selected from a general repository and told with the generality of a scientific theory. Instead, they are localized and idiosyncratic to some degree. They are told from a perspective that the students of a particular institution can relate to, and they resonate with these students in a manner that is consistent with the theory and abstractions that they have been taught. A properly crafted case is tailored to the audience, and instructors are in need of tools that can help them rework case materials in a fashion that is consistent with the students’ total educational experience. Any lack of consistency will be perceived as a distraction from the heavy course load that engineering students already bear, however interesting that temporary distraction may be. In this paper, we begin by introducing two initial sets of case study materials that were presented and used separately in multiple offerings of the same course over a two-year period. Next, we present a method for systematizing the process of creating case study materials based on a careful analysis of the course’s format, content, and learning outcomes. Then we describe one of these cases in more detail to show how it was used to develop a standardized structure for cases, and to illustrate some of the valuable software engineering relevant lessons that it brought into the classroom. Finally, we discuss how this method has allowed us to quickly transfer the experiences that our graduate-level students gain through local industry-led projects into useful case study materials that retain their unique and localized flair, but also remain deeply integrated with the principles and nomenclature of the course by conforming to a standard model. RELATED WORK A key challenge to instructors in many fields, like software engineering, is teaching students how to cope with the human element of their future professional careers. Software engineering is a people-oriented profession, in which success relies as much on correctly identifying problems to be solved as it does actually solving them [11].