SCCs proved effective at Carnegie Mellon University

The idea of a full year Story-Centered Curriculum as a replacement for the usual array of courses has already been tried and has worked well at Carnegie Mellon’s new West Coast Campus in California. Six Master’s degree programs primarily in fields related to computer science have been offered there since 2002, and by August nearly 250 students will have graduated from these programs. The programs are each housed on a website and are delivered to students either online or in person from the newly established West Coast campus.

Our job there was to take existing Master’s degree programs and turn them into SCCs. This meant we needed to work with the faculty to examine the existing curriculum and discern how it would feed into one coherent story that would entail practice of the salient skills they were teaching in their individual courses. The existing curriculum had broken the things software engineers (for example) know and do into separate, decontextualized topics, such as Models, Methods, Architectures, and Management. The job of a software engineer was sliced “vertically,” so that each skill area would be taught as a silo of its own.

The problem with separating subjects for courses is that no one uses skills in that way in real life. The ability to solve real world, complex problems requires one to be able to use a given set of skills at the right time, in the right context, amidst the use of other skills related to the same context. In other words, on the job, software engineers are given software systems they need to build or improve upon. To solve the problem they may not consider Methods in and of themselves. Rather, they have to consider how the Methods, Models, and Architectures work together to become a software solution, and they have to plan the Management of the execution accordingly.

Something else the faculty came to realize once we started closely examining what everyone was really teaching was that their individual subjects were so closely tied to the other subjects that they figured out they were overlapping on various skills to ensure coverage. If everything fit into a sensible context, there would be no overlap, and it would be clear exactly what the students were being taught, when, and why. Typically , faculty weren't familiar with what other faculty are teaching, other than the name of the course.

Therefore, our task in turning the old curriculum into an SCC was to re-slice the job of a software engineer “horizontally,” so we could present to students “a project in the life of a software engineer.” Students would need to engineer software solutions to given realistic problems, and along the way, learn and practice the relevant matters related to Models, Methods, Architectures, Management, and everything else the faculty deemed important, but this time, they would be practiced iteratively and intermingled, as they typically are in the real world. Students would be asked to solve real-world problems and use these skills to do so. It would be clear they learned what was needed, because they would produce the interim deliverables and final software that was requested of them.

Students’ reactions

The response by students – particularly those that are working professionals – has been overwhelmingly positive. Some comments include:

“The SCC approach "really mimics the real world more than the traditional classroom does. I am already working in teams at work... Classroom instruction has the student come away knowing a lot of theory but provides little guided practice with actually trying to use that knowledge in a realistic setting on realistic problems and working in a team... I am already taking a lot away from my schoolwork and applying it to my job, because I can leverage it right away... What I learn on Monday I can apply on Wednesday... Here I feel we will use everything we learn."

“Unless you have some realistic deliverable, you won’t know how to apply what you learn... (in this way) the just-in-time learning approach is phenomenal."

Another student says: “this sure beats sitting in lectures and exams, we get to do something really cool, create something interesting”

CMU's reaction

CMU liked what we did with the SCC so much they have begun to import some of the ideas back to Pittsburgh.