CS 3773

Computer Science

Course Awards

2017

Student savings/semester
$8,250
Jianwei Niu, Ph.D., Xiaoyin Wang, Ph.D., Mark Robinson, Ph. D.

The team is using an open access software engineering textbook by Ivan Marsic called Software Engineering and slides available from Rutgers as the primary textbook for CS 3773.

More from the team:

"Software Engineering textbooks have historically had high cost and moderate quality. Our students complain about the cost of them every semester. We also usually supplement the textbooks with our own lecture slides, assignments, and case studies. Thus, the textbook ends up not playing a major role in the satisfaction of the course's learning objectives.

We feel we can use a free alternative to the core software engineering body of knowledge, reduce student expenses, possibly improve course enrollments and reduce course dropouts, and deliver the same if not better quality of software engineering education."

"Moving to a free textbook for our Software Engineering course can function as a test run for the entire department. If student feedback and test scores are good enough after the initial semester or two, we will advocate its adoption in other CS courses that require expensive textbooks, and help willing CS faculty to make the transition."