MToB. System Architecture 1: General Objectives. T - 9M

After may be a too large time span (3 months), I report again in my quest for the perfect course. In my previous MToB post, I was about to delve in the always intricate world of curriculum guidelines. The objective: finding the perfect set of objectivies for the second year course. The more I read about these issues the less clear the picture. There are way too many notations, very few works talk about concrete issues, you never find an example of a course close enough to what you are designing. Instead, lots of blah, blah, blah about trivial objectives. Things such as "oral communication skills", "teamwork skills", etc. appear way too often. Concrete examples adapted to your course, well, that's another story.

Luckily for me, once again, Miguel Valero came to the rescue. After spending quite a few hours and crafting a couple of documents trying to make sense of the process to obtain the high level course objectives, I wrote an email to my colleague expressing my frustration when searching for this type of information. His response was exactly what I needed: "before wasting all your energies searching for the perfect methodology to create the course objectives, here is this document that I did devoting lots of hours to what you are doing so you can save it for more interesting things". Excellent.

The document Miguel Valero sent me is a methodology (as good as any other) to follow the path from abstract objectives (those that appear in the curriculum guidelines) to more concrete ones. After this trip through the land of competencies, objectives, recommendations, and so forth, I think most of the complexity comes from the fact that it is a continuum of abstraction layers with a tendency to stay always in the higher levels. In other words, different documents talk about objectives, competencies and all these ingredients but at different levels of abstractions and always with similar terminology. The topic does not lend itself nicely to a clearly organized taxonomy of terms and abstraction levels (or at least I haven't encountered a clearly stated one).

When designing a course, there is one crucial first step though that puts you in the right direction: designing the course general objectives. Course general objectives are recommended to be wide in scope but within the course and should be only a few of them. This means that you first need to clarify the level of abstraction in which you need to position yourself, and then, write them. After quite some thought and taking a lot of inspiration from the previously mentioned document sent by Prof. Valero, here are the Course General Objectives:

1. Design programs to run in mobile devices. This objective contains a small principle declaration. Programming is required for the type of degree where the course is placed, but programming mobile devices is a more specific environment. For example, special tools such as cross-compilers need to be used. The idea is to deploy a complete application in one of these devices.
2. Use the most common tools for the development of mobile applications. These tools might include (yet to be decided) IDEs such as eclipse, version control software, memory profiling, tests, etc.
3. Work effectively within a team. This is one of the most challenging objectives. It amonts to a huge departure from conventional course organization and embracing it means re-think a large portion of the course. The tasks need to be conceived to encourage positive interdependency and individual accountability.
4. Learn autonomously. This is also a tricky one to bring to life. The type of tasks assigned to the students should be designed as to emphasize this attitude. Students now search for lots of new information on the net. Tap into that potential and elevate to the category of autonomous learning is no trivial task

Although they might seem trivial statements, they provide the boundary conditions from which to derive now the rest of the course structure. When building a house, you need to first mark in the land where all the pieces should be placed. The next step is now to decompose these objectives into much more specific ones within the course. The list will be much larger and detailed. Long journey ahead!