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China currently has one of the world's fastest growing software industries. However the demand for skilled software engineers is currently outstripping supply. Educational institutes are the primary provider of software engineers. Not only can China's educational institutes not meet the demands of software engineers in terms of quantity, the quality of software engineering graduates at the moment is considered insufficient. The need for educational institutes to be more aware of industry requirements for software engineering graduates and to tailor the curriculum and teaching and learning practice to better fulfill these has been recognized as critical to China's success. To assist with this the Emersion project was established in 2003 to attempt to exchange knowledge and expertise between the EU and China with the goal of developing an industry-oriented education model for software engineering in China. In this paper, we describe our experiences in developing the curriculum which is at the heart of this model and which is based on published best practice and experience of industry and academia in the EU and China.

The Emersion education model was designed by embracing experience from industry and academia in Ireland, the UK and China. A significant part of the model is a curriculum for an honours degree programme in Computer Science to be delivered in the Harbin Institute of Technology, China. Elements of the curriculum are strongly aligned in three ways: constructively, horizontally and vertically. Constructive alignment is the well accepted approach to curriculum design which emphasises that learning, teaching and assessment must be aligned with the learning outcomes of all components of the programme. Horizontal alignment of elements requires the student to transfer problem solving knowledge between domains at the same stage of the programme. Vertical alignment requires that elements are structured to build on foundational knowledge and provide a platform for future elements. When combined, the three dimensions of alignment guide the curriculum development process. Our 3D aligned curriculum demonstrates how components interlink at various layers in a hierarchy to support the development of both the technical and transferrable skills required by the software industry in China and elsewhere.