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Higher education programs need to prepare their graduates for the practical challenges they can expect to face upon entering the workforce. Students can be better prepared if their academic learning is reinforced through authentic workplace experience, where the link between theory and professional practice can be realized. Increasingly, such learning in the workplace is being seen as an integral part of the university curricula as evidenced through the implementation of the Learning the Workplace & Community (LiWC) Policy at Victoria University, Australia. This policy mandates a minimum of 25% content and assessment of all academic programs be related to work-integrated learning. Recognizing the need for authentic workplace experience in the IT undergraduate program, a review found that the existing work-related learning component accounted for only half the required 25% LiWC commitment. Currently, the LiWC component is an industry-based capstone project that spans two semesters in the final year of study. These projects allow students to work on real-life software development tasks where they experience the practical challenges of building software systems whilst appreciating the needs of a business client. In a search of the literature, campus-located industry projects were identified as one of the two most common work-related learning experiences in IT programs, the other being internships sited in the workplace. By retaining the current project-based component, it was decided to add an internship to the program to further bolster the student learning experience and graduate outcomes. This paper details the existing program structure and explores two possible implementations for the achievement of the LiWC policy. The first approach necessitates the addition of one academic year of cooperative education internship to be placed strategically between the current second and third years. Alternatively, the second proposal sacrifices several elective units to accommodate a final semester internship experience. The paper discusses both alternatives against various issues under consideration: staffing and administration, assessment, industry partnerships, professional accreditation and its impact upon differing cohorts of students. (Contains 3 figures.)

This paper reports on an exploratory investigation of the perceptions of information and communication technology (ICT) as a field of study and work in German secondary schools. A total of 160 students from five secondary schools in Lower Saxony participated in the study in February 2007, and four teachers of the students were interviewed. The investigation is part of the research carried out by the authors within the Griffith University Women in Information Technology (WinIT) project, which has been studying the problem of low female participation since 1995. In this paper we discuss German school students' (male and female) and their teachers' views of ICT, its use at school and home, their influences in using technology, and their ideas about working with technology in the future. We drew on the challenges faced and opportunities available to teachers in the study to put this in context. We found that many senior secondary students have not decided what they want to do when they finish school, suggesting that the environment is ripe for them to receive relevant and useful information that may help them to choose to study tertiary ICT courses. By dispelling negative ICT perceptions and allowing students to make an informed choice as to whether to take up a career in ICT, we can hopefully encourage more students into this ever-growing and exciting industry. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

While most Information Systems (IS) professionals spend much of their time in the implementation or management of projects, the curriculum of university Information Technology (IT) courses does not always reflect this. While most university IT courses cover some aspects of project management, some do not go into this topic in any depth, and many make this a wholly theoretical exercise, particularly at the postgraduate level. We have found that students, even postgraduate students, often lack a practical frame of reference and so if the material is presented only in a theoretical manner, some of the nuances of project management issues escape them. In the paper we describe and advocate a practical approach to teaching IT Project Management to postgraduate business students from many different disciplines. In particular, we advocate the construction of student assignments designed to make use of project management software to handle the on-going management of projects as well as project planning, the use of online student exercises, and student class presentations as a way of achieving this. The paper outlines the approach used at Victoria University and relates some of the student feedback we have received. The paper is set out in five sections: (1) The Importance of IT Project Management. In this section we examine the importance of this subject area and the need to include it in postgraduate IT and other business courses; (2) Teaching IT Project Management Concepts. Next we discuss some of the teaching concepts and issues involved in relation to a learning model; (3) IT Project Management Subject Structure. This section describes the subject "IT Project Management" taught at Victoria University, detailing the content and the assignments. (4) Student Evaluation. Surveys have been conducted at the end of each semester for the last three semesters on what students thought of the subject and what they thought they had learned. This section describes and analyses this student feedback; and (5) Conclusion. Our approach to teaching "IT Project Management" involves both lectures and practical assignments. It gives particular stress to the use of project management software to plan, monitor and control a project. We conclude that it works well with both postgraduate IT and general business students.

Lack of accessibility in the design of e-learning courses continues to hinder students with vision impairment. E-learning materials are predominantly vision-centric, incorporating images, animation, and interactive media, and as a result students with acute vision impairment do not have equal opportunity to gain tertiary qualifications or skills relevant to the marketplace and their disability. Due to its logical, rather than physical, nature IT help desk and network administration roles are ideal for people who are blind. This paper describes the development of a fully accessible e-learning environment to deliver advanced IT network curriculum to adults with acute vision disabilities. The components include a virtual classroom, accessible learning materials, a remote computer laboratory, and delivery of the learning materials by vision impaired instructors. Industry standard courses in advanced IT were redeveloped, and the accessible on-line learning environment was developed to deliver the courses. Vision impaired students who excelled in the pilot project were trained as instructors, gaining industry-standard instructor certifications. These instructors were used to assist with the design of accessible methods and delivered the materials to the vision impaired students. The project has been operational for four years with a pilot project being conducted over a two year period, followed by the delivery of the courses both local and remote vision impaired students across the globe using this accessible e-learning environment for the past two years. Evaluation results indicate that vision impaired students situated both locally and remotely gained equivalent grades to their sighted counterparts given additional time to comprehend and experiment via the virtual classroom and remote computer laboratory. In addition, the use of vision impaired instructors has resulted in more innovative approaches to accessible teaching methods and delivery of the curriculum. (Contains 4 tables.)

This paper reports on the findings from a quantitative research study into the use of a software tool that was built to support a part-complete solution method (PCSM) for the learning of computer programming. The use of part-complete solutions to programming problems is one of the methods that can be used to reduce the cognitive load that students experience during their learning. The tool that was built is a code restructuring tool known as CORT. It permits the display of a part-complete solution to a programming task together with a set of possible lines of code that can be used to "fill-in" the solution. Students can then easily manipulate the programming lines within CORT and then test their solutions within a traditional development environment such as Microsoft's Visual Studio. An inquiry into CORT's effect on student learning outcomes took place over a period of 14 weeks at an Australian university. Two student groups participated in an introductory programming unit, one of which utilized the CORT system whilst the other acted as a control group. Data were collected on student background, time taken to complete programming tasks, the amount of help that students required, and student learning outcomes. The data were analysed using a statistical package, and it was found that there was no significant difference in the relative levels of achievement between students in the two groups. However the results did indicate that students in the CORT group spent significantly less time and required significantly less help than the students in the control group. This suggests that if the CORT students had spent extra time on further programming tasks such that their overall time had been equal to that of the non-CORT students, then they may have achieved higher learning outcomes. Also the fact that the CORT students required less help than the control group suggests that the use of CORT might be beneficial to students studying programming in external mode where access to tutor help is more problematic. The data were also analysed to determine if there were any differences with respect to student achievement between the sub-groups of: previous achievement level; age; computer literacy level; previous programming experience; and gender. The analysis revealed that the CORT students who were either younger, only moderately computer literate, or without any previous programming experience, performed at a lower level than their non-CORT counterparts in reading and comprehending computer programs. This might be because these sub-groups have ill-developed mental models of program execution and therefore have greater difficulty comprehending code. It suggests that such students completed their programs relatively quickly with CORT, with less experimentation, and that this hindered their mental model development. (Contains 25 tables and 6 figures.)

Year-long team projects with external clients provide a well recognized opportunity for students to gain industry experience, whilst being supported and guided by staff to minimize risks. Each group should be supervised to ensure that they have enough direction and confidence to approach a new problem of significant size, without being daunted. A structure is needed that is flexible and adaptable to suit various institutional cultures but, at the same time, provides the safety net to ensure that success is likely. This paper presents a reflective analysis of teaching at three different institutions and presents the resulting distilled wisdom of experience that has produced a structured framework for capstone project units. The proposed structure is scalable to any class size and portable across institutions and potentially across technical disciplines. The structure leads to team student projects that are successfully engaging and provide excellent experience toward producing work-ready graduates. The structure is flexible in design so that the teaching workload does not increase too much as class sizes increase, but students are still well supported with appropriate scaffolding and mentoring. We detail the key factors in our framework: careful project selection, appropriate sign posts, and helpful guides that together improve upon overall project success. We argue that students need appropriate projects, "good" clients, and a well formed team. The sign posts support students through the "uncharted waters" of ill-defined problem-based learning. Sign posts include: deliverables, deadlines, team notebook, progress reports, and accountable time-tracking. Helpful guides spread the teaching workload broadly: relying on cultural expectations, technology, team supervisor, feedback, and clear marking guidelines. This structure has been successfully implemented in at least three different universities in Australia and several remote partner teaching sites in different countries over many years. We have provided case study examples of implementations in three different Australian Universities: a large urban university (The University of Melbourne), a small urban university (Victoria University) and a regional university (The University of Ballarat). Students benefit from such an experience in their final stages of an undergraduate computing degree. The scaffolding and support provided by the structure enables students to improve their skills in technical development, communication, team work, project management and client negotiation. The project unit provides opportunities for independent self directed learning and realistic experiences in an environment that allows for experiential learning. Students are engaged when working with real problems for real industry clients. Our student feedback supports our view that students' confidence in their ability to manage a project is enhanced through their project experience. Based on our own observations and anecdotal feedback, we believe that our students benefit and are helped to become "industry ready" graduates through the learning experienced in the capstone project course. This same structure could be used successfully in similar programs. We would encourage others to consider adapting this framework to their institutional context, as we have collectively found it a positive model to help us manage the considerable workload in offering successful year long undergraduate software projects with clients. (Contains 2 tables.)

This paper focuses on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) academics' perceptions of factors that promote and inhibit their pursuit of scholarship in their teaching work. It identifies critical factors that influence academics' attitudes, orientations and behaviours in respect to the scholarship of teaching, and from these builds a framework for understanding the interaction between these factors. We have named this framework the "Scholarship of Teaching Support Framework." During 2001 and 2002 a national project investigated teaching and learning initiatives in the major discipline of ICT in Australia's universities. As part of this project a mini-conference program was devised to elicit academics' perceptions of the factors influencing their teaching work and their participation in scholarly activities around this work. In total 83 ICT teachers from 29 universities participated in the mini-conference program. Attendees included staff members from a range of academic levels. In discussions of aspects of the scholarship of teaching at the mini-conference participants referred to both attributes and responses of both university teachers and the university institutions. We have categorized these factors into those that relate to the individual academic ("Individual domain") and those that relate to the tertiary institutional system ("Organisational domain"). Many contributions highlighted the interaction between these two domains. Within the "Individual domain," two key factors described by participants as affecting the pursuit of the scholarship of teaching were teachers' motivation towards, and their capabilities in, scholarly activities surrounding their teaching. Within the organizational domain two influential factors also emerged. These were the organizational support provided through allocation of resources and symbolic support reflected in an institution's systems, policies and processes. Our findings indicate that both the "Individual" and "Organizational domains" contribute to university teachers' decisions to pursue (or not to pursue) the scholarship of teaching. These two domains were seen by participants to interact within university environments to influence whether a particular environment is supportive or unsupportive in terms of the pursuit of the scholarship of teaching. Factors both from and within the individual and the organizational domains were seen to interact with each other forming a web of interrelated factors that appear to influence individuals' decisions to pursue, or not to pursue, the scholarship of teaching. From this complexity four theoretical extremes emerged providing the dimensions and components of the Scholarship of Teaching Support Framework. We argue that responsive and innovative approaches to university teaching are best supported by academics undertaking scholarly activities around their teaching work, yet this article presents a picture of a university work environment where scholarly activities that focus on teaching and learning are seen as generally unsupported and unrewarded. This perception was identified as commonalities across a university system. Although some exceptions were noted, participants generally agreed that the "organisational domain" of Australian universities was largely unsupportive of the pursuit of the scholarship of teaching. Similarly, in general, university ICT teachers were not thought to have the backgrounds and capabilities necessary for pursuing the scholarship of teaching, such as familiarity with literature on teaching and learning and skills in educational evaluation. However, despite perceived inhibitors in universities' organisational culture and allocation of resources, and a perceived lack in individuals' skills, participants agreed that scholarly activities and innovation in university teaching and learning "do" take place, These are largely driven by the intrinsic motivation of individuals. It was recognised that further work is necessary to explore how motivation can be engendered and encouraged. The "Scholarship of Teaching Support Framework" is a useful tool for examining how conducive a given university teaching context is to the scholarship of teaching and, therefore, can be used for review purposes within both research and policy contexts. Such tools will become increasingly important as policy changes begin to affect practices in how university teaching work is managed, supported and encouraged. (Contains 3 figures.)

Teaching future knowledge engineers, the necessary skills for designing and implementing intelligent software solutions required by business, industry and research today, is a very tall order. These skills are not easily taught in traditional undergraduate computer science lectures; nor are the practical experiences easily reinforced in laboratory sessions. In an attempt to address this issue, a software development project, designed to take students through a complete process of knowledge engineering, was introduced in an undergraduate Intelligent Systems subject. In this project, students were required to act as domain experts, knowledge engineers, programmers, end users and project manager in the production of a game-playing expert system. The paper describes the project, its objectives and development, as well as some of the benefits. (Contains 3 figures and 1 table.)