Integrating Communication Instruction Throughout Computer Science and Software Engineering Curricula

Abstract Integrating Communication Instruction Throughout Computer Science and Software Engineering Curricula One of the more intractable challenges facing engineering education has been providinggraduates with the communication abilities necessary for their success and that of theiremployers. While employers place effective communication at the top of the qualities they seekin new engineers, engineering programs typically relegate communication instruction to atechnical writing course taught by another department and, possibly, one or two courses in theirprograms. While technical writing courses provided by non-engineering faculty are helpful, theyare too general to prepare students adequately for the domain specific communicating theyrequired in their careers. Attention to communication in few engineering courses is alsobeneficial but doesn’t provide enough breadth or guided practice. Isolation of communicationinstruction in these ways reinforces the assumption by many students that writing, speaking, andother communication assignments are “busy work” rather than key aspects of their professionaleducation. Supported by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, we are developingand piloting model curricula that teach communication skills as an integral part of computerscience (CS) and software engineering (SE) courses. We are identifying learning outcomes anddeveloping course materials that provide students with the reading, writing, speaking, andteaming skills needed to communicate effectively in engineering and production environments.Our interdisciplinary team includes computer science, software engineering, and technicalcommunication specialists from the lead institutions, Miami University and North CarolinaState University, and from twelve other colleges and universities. The project will producemodel curricula developed and evaluated at Miami and NCSU, sample assignments developedat a variety of types of institutions, and teaching materials for instruction and evaluation ofstudents’ communication skills. While we are working with CS and SE programs, our approachcould be adapted in any engineering field. We started with a three-day workshop at which university participants and industryrepresentatives discussed the communication skills needed by CS/SE graduates and formedcourse-teams to develop outcomes and assignments for six core courses that span from theintroductory class through the capstone. At a second workshop, we reviewed pilot assignmentsand participated in training sessions on teaching and evaluating communication skills in CS/SEcourses. In the next two years, we will continue to develop teaching materials and pilotassignments, focusing on ways to integrate work done in individual courses into clearlyarticulated pathways in which students develop communication abilities progressively in thesame way they build technical expertise as they advance through their four years ofundergraduate study. We will also develop ways of making the resources we create available toengineering educators nationwide. Our paper will present results from the first year of the project, including the definition ofcommunication skills, general and domain specific, required by our graduates (as defined byindustry partners at our first workshop), definition of the audiences and genres involved inCS/SE specific communication, and examples of general strategies we developed for fusingcommunication and technical work in CS/SE courses.