Australasian Association for Engineering Education Annual Conference 2014 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering 2014 Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand 8-10 December 2014 AAEE 2014 and IEEE TALE 2014 Conference Book Transformations to Issues in Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Methods in Databases Courses Tarik A. Rashid The Information and Communication Technology Center, Salahaddin University, Hawler, Kurdistan. tarik.rashid@su.edu.iq Raghdah S. Al-Radhy Computer Engineering/IT Department, Ishik University, Hawler, Kurdistan. ragdasadik@gmail.com Abstract— there is a high demand from academic centers, business firms and marketplaces for highly qualified expertise in database areas. As a result, it is undoubtedly fundamental for academic researchers in the field of databases and education to conduct more research works so that to enhance teaching, learning, and assessing methods of database courses. This paper describes the salient features of these databases courses and highlights the issues of traditional teaching/learning/assessing methods of database courses at universities in Kurdistan in general. This paper also provides comprehensive reformations to those issues. Keywords: Dataabses, Learning and Assessemnt Methods, Database Teaching Issues and Transforamtions. I. INTRODUCTION Database technologies have shaped to great extent almost all theoretical systems and generated a good number of practical systems after years of development. It is actually estimated that approximately 80% of the entire computer applications are connected to database technology applications [1, 2]. In addition to this, the development of technologies in the field of network communications and knowledge mining has created more prospects and further views for database technologies [2]. According to Hui, databases and their technologies are the basis of information resources manipulation, utilisation and administration of information in the information society. Hence, teaching databases & management information systems courses and taking responsibilities to nourish the theoretical and practical aspects of these courses to learners at the universities and institutions are paramount of importance in higher education. It is worth mentioning that instructors in databases and related courses must be concerned with how to teach their learners so that to fulfill the needs and supplies of their community demand [3]. It is also clear that not having a distinct accepted design methodology for all universities for relational databases creates many problems for instructors in educational systems. The design of databases leans to be contingent rather on more experience, trial and error, educated presumptions and perceptions than steps that are taken prudently to design [6]. In fact with having these problems in the subject, the instructors will have more difficulty to explain to their learners which require getting management perspectives instead of having profound treatment of some practicality that are common in Computer Science that can be found in text books [4, 5, 7]. There is also a traditional problem at universities in which a transition from very old type of databases such as the hierarchical structure which were very common in 60s, then through the networks structure in 70s, to relational model in 80s and continued to 90s [7]. The paper in the following sections aims at identifying major problems and issues in traditional teaching databases courses such as contents, methods, teaching materials, practical problems, etc. and producing suggested teaching transformations to these problems and issues. II. DATABASE TEACHING AND LEARNING ISSUES The importance of database theory is clearly seen and reflected on the teaching traditional database theories and their practical applications. This is a problem and it can be resulted in the absence of the learner’s skills and knowledge in terms of training on database program design competences and operational endowments [1, 2]. Thus, teaching databases at universities in Kurdistan in general is not taken its path from learning and teaching theories to learners in the hope to handle concrete and applied issues. There are a number of issues in teaching and learning database courses that can be identified in this paper and these are as follows:-