A Technical History of the SEI

Education and Training Delivery Platforms
The Challenge: Deliver Education and Training to Large, Geographically
Dispersed Audiences
In 1984, not only were there very few academic programs in software engineering, there were
very few software engineering courses and few faculty prepared to teach the subject matter. Software
engineering was evolving, and it included subject matter (such as software specification,
verification and validation, and project management) not normally covered in computer science or
other disciplines. Although the subject matter was taught in various industrial continuing education
programs for practicing engineers, it was not part of an accepted academic discipline [Ardis
2005].
Faculty who participated with the SEI in development of the model curriculum made clear that,
while they had an intellectual grasp of the material, they did not have the experience to translate
that material into lectures and courses. Commercial companies were training their practicing engineers
on evolving methodologies specific to their respective companies, but this material was generally
not visible to the academic community.
A Solution: Take Advantage of Changing Technologies
The SEI recognized the opportunity to accelerate the learning curve by using technology. The SEI
could increase its support to other universities by videotaping the Carnegie Mellon courses and
offering them to other colleges and universities. Recognizing that it was neither practical for SEI
people to travel to other universities nor for university faculty from other universities to spend significant
time at the SEI, the SEI constructed a video studio. The class lectures of six courses from
the model curriculum selected by the CMU MSE program [Gibbs 1990] were delivered to CMU
students in the studio. The video recordings of these lectures were then provided to other universities.
Some universities showed the videos as the course offering. At other universities, faculty reviewed
the videos to further their own understanding and then offered similar, tailored lectures to
their students. Florida Atlantic University (FAU) had a unique partnership with the SEI and graduated
a number of master of software engineering students as well as certificate holders—as a result
of the partnership and the creative way in which FAU used the MSE videos and collaborated
with the MSE faculty.
In subsequent years, the SEI has continued to supplement traditional classroom training by taking
advantage of new technology to capture and disseminate training. The video studio, created to
support the academic education courses, was subsequently used to record lectures by leaders in
the software engineering community to provide insight into important developments, resulting in
a stand-alone public video series. The video studio was also used to videotape many of the SEI
continuing education courses.
As media moved beyond videotape, the SEI developed a catalog of asynchronous web-based, selfpaced
e-learning and broadcast virtual “live” online training. The SEI maintains an eLearning
Portal, which is the platform for the development and delivery of SEI eLearning courses. This
portal supports a wide variety of training formats to best fit the SEI content and learners’ preferences.
Blended learning courses, especially the Personal Software Process (PSP) curriculum, use
both an online and a classroom instructor to provide instruction. Other asynchronous online
CMU/SEI-2016-SR-027 | SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INSTITUTE | CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY 89
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