According to Tavani (2004), CSSE educators in universities are also regarded as ICT professionals. Therefore they are ethically required to advance the integrity and reputation of the profession and ensure that their ”products”, the graduates, meet the highest professional standards possible, as suggested by the SECEPP core principles. The educators shall ”constantly seek new channels, methods and technologies to reach and intrigue the students ... teach them skills that they can apply in the real world” [JS03]. A successful educational model should support the educators to achieve their goals.

One of the main factors that influence the CSSE educational model, as Gruba et al. [GPJ04] point out, is employer and industry viewpoints. As shown in the previous section, employers are not seeing the right skills in current graduates. This suggests that the current educational model is not effective, and probably needs an overhaul. Before we get to that, we will first uncover the flaws of the current model.

Corporatised education

Faber (2002) argues against the move to corporatise education, where knowledge of systems, techniques, tools, and processes can become a competitive advantage and more valuable when it is restricted from public use. Such restrictions have little effect on market practices already based on economies of supply and demand; however, they conflict with the academic culture of knowledge creation, education and learning. The corporatisation of education is evident as employers exert their pressures directly on universities to revise CSSE courses to reflect industry demands [GPJ04]. It proposes the proprietary university, where knowledge created by university researchers and students are withheld from broad public dissemination and even from fellow academics.

Weakening of the academic community

The emphasis on proprietary knowledge weakens the academic community. It indirectly encourages academics to work in isolation, thus making the dissemination of ideas and practices problematic. The lack of knowledge and resource sharing leads to the unawareness of latest innovations and technologies, which can result in ”reinventing the wheel” issues [SJ04]. Another negative consequence of working in isolation is the weakening of the relationship within the academic community, especially between students and experienced academics. Gruba et al observe that as a result of this, students will not participate in further education after undergraduate level. This means a loss of potential researchers for the academic community, thereby reducing the pool of knowledge even further.

Scarcity of resources

The scarcity of financial and human resources is another issue with the current model. For example, despite team projects being arguably the most important part of the education for would-be software engineers, they are quota-ed as they are disproportionately expensive to mount [GPJ04]. Even for large firms, they cannot afford to run today’s project scales in-house [S.04]. Furthermore, the high cost of proprietary software does not help the situation. The issue of insufficient funding also leads to the scarcity of suitably qualified staff, which slows down the improvement of the syllabi. It also does not allow the educators to focus on students of high calibre, as they need to cater for mediocre students in order to ”fill the quotas” [GPJ04].

Ineffective collaboration

Collaborative learning projects offered in current courses are heavily criticised for being ineffective. Faber argues that outside of universities, few programmers ever start from scratch, yet university projects and assignments continue to perpetuate students working on solitary, new projects. He decries these academic projects for being stagnant and only addressed to one audience (the professor) for a one-time purpose, lacking real-world awareness and concern for real users.

Since projects are determined by the length of academic terms, students may initiate a project, work on it for several weeks, then complete it for credit before the term ends. Faber criticises this practice for not teaching students the importance of effective documentation, notetaking and actual collaborative work because no one ever continues the projects they initiate. As a result, students do not learn the importance of good project management, such as how to gracefully and appropiately hand-off projects, how to strategically break projects into stages or how to mentor new initiates into their projects.

Being in isolated, purely academic projects, students lack the experience of examining their roles in a larger community of peers from various backgrounds and specialist areas, domain experts, authorities, novice users etc. Hence, they cannot master desirable transferable skills such as communication and social skills as required by the industry.

These problems associated with the current educational model raise four main issues that violate the IEEE-CS/ACM SECEPP core principles [T.04]. Firstly, it fails to produce the products (the graduates) that meet the highest professional standards possible. Secondly, since students can be regarded as customers of universities, the model fails to act in their best interests by not equipping them with fully refined skills before they enter the workforce. Thirdly, it does not satisfy the expectations of the employers. Finally, by taking a corporatised approach to education that values secrecy and proprietary knowledge, it does not act in the best interests of the public.