Career outcomes are widely used by Universities to market their programs but there is scant evidence that they are attainable by graduates or if they inform curriculum design. This paper reports on a process for designing a University ICT curriculum that is directly informed by the career outcomes relevant to both local and national ICT industry. Outputs from this process are a set of classified attainable graduate career outcomes and a set of graduate skills that are the basis for the further stages of the curriculum development.
Java Programming Laboratory (JPL) is a cloud based learning environment used for teaching object-oriented programming at Griffith University, Australia. JPL incorporates a number of features found in other successful programming learning environments and builds upon them with a range of innovative features. JPL provides a database that tracks individual students’ successes and progression through scaffolded programming exercises and assessment items and gives students immediate feedback on their use of programming language syntax and correctness of problem solutions. A data querying and visualisation facility allows analysis of the database to provide real-time performance indicators from the overall course / problem level down to the individual student / specific problem level. Programming instructors and curriculum designers will find that this facility allows a responsive approach to student engagement, assistance and progression; as well as course problem tuning in a just-in-time manner.
