Complete thesis - Murdoch University

components.These are common to all Engineering students within our School (egnatural sciences, mathematics, management, ethics)provided the basis for:Design Project/Engineering Thesis - these are also common to all Engineering students,though the domain of application targets the appropriate discipline of study. While theProject may be industry-based, it is run under controlled conditions, and carefullymonitored by academic staff. The Thesis, on the other hand focuses on industry andmay be linked to work-place experiences: the student spends 25% of the penultimatesemester, rising to 50% in the last. Supervision is joint academic/industry, with thestudent required to complete and present a thesis based on the project.Underlying these is a common set of support material and resources, including web resources,process tools and documentation templates. Students are encouraged to apply this materialas much as possible, and in some instances are formally required to do so.The decision has been made to offer support for units, so far as is practical, online: theWeb was seen as a medium to support student control of the learning process through itscapacity to help learners develop unique knowledge representations (Miller and Miller, 1999)and is said to be well suited to domains of conceptual complexity and case-to-case irregularitywhere teaching in a hands-on medium has application (Brandt, 1997). Many areasof Engineering (and in particular Software Engineering) fit this category of material. ThisICT-based integrated environment is described more fully in Armarego et al (2001).Within this curriculum framework there are eight core SE units: Requirements Engineering(ENG260) is the first to which students are exposed, offered in semester 1 of the second yearof study. Prior to this, all engineering students have undertaken a common first year: theyhave generally been immersed in a scientific/engineering paradigm where problem-solvingthrough laboratory procedure, repeatability of experimentation and rigour in mathematicsare key learning objectives. The result of this is strong preconceptions in first year studentsabout both teaching and learning.As can be seen from the description above, this curriculum closely models a normative professionaleducation curriculum (Waks, 2001) previously discussed (see Chapter 3), in whichstudents first study basic science, then the relevant applied science , so that learning maybe viewed as a progression to expertise through task analysis, strategy selection, try-out andrepetition (Winn and Snyder, 1996).456