The Reform Scheme of Practice-Courses Cooperation Training Pattern of Software Engineering Major of Overseas Chinese Universities

Jin Gou＊, Wei Luo, Kongjie Lin, Yaxuan Zhang

Abstract: How to improve the employment of software engineering graduates, especially, how to effectively enhance the employment competitiveness of relevant overseas students in the context of "One Belt and One Road" is one of the core tasks of overseas Chinese universities. This paper proposes a reform plan for the practical training mode of school-enterprise cooperative project in the software engineering of overseas Chinese universities. The reform plan combines education concepts with practical research and development. It subdivides students and according to the characteristics of different types of students, and is carried out on campus, outside campus (in the province), and abroad (original area), which makes senior undergraduates fully understand the needs of enterprises, constantly improve their professional practice ability, and improve their competitiveness. Thus, the professional innovation and entrepreneurship ability of students is enhanced, and it also reduces the cost of employee entry.

Key words: software engineering; overseas students;project training

1 The Current Situation of Practical Training in Softwar e Engineering of Overseas Chinese Universities

At present, the practical training of software engineering is usually arranged in the third and fourth year, as a required course of professional practice, and plays a very important role in improving the practical ability and employment competitiveness of students[1-2].This course aims at designing and implementing the practical training mode suitable for students in different aspects such as foundation, language, learning method,employment intention, and so on. There are four types:

Type 1: Schools and local well-known enterprises(mainly listed companies) cooperate to establish the undergraduate practical training teaching base,which is located in both the enterprise and the campus laboratory. Relying on the practical teaching base, the school and enterprise cooperation agree on the project,specification, teacher, process, time and so on, and introduces to the seniors (usually third-year students).Students choose their own practical training enterprises according to their actual situation. Students participate in the professional basic written test and interview of the organization. If the two sides are satis fied with each other, the students will be sure to participate in the training, in the enterprise or on the campus laboratory.The project team of the campus laboratory is mainly guided by the teachers of the university and the highlevel technical staff of the enterprise involve in the guidance. The project team of enterprise training shall be guided by the technical personnel of the enterprise,and the school shall assign teachers to cooperate with the company in the course of practical training.

The practical training mode is shown in Fig. 1,which is applicable to students both inside and outside the country. The school supervision of the training process is very specific, and it can accurately track the actual training of every student in each team.

Type 2: If overseas Chinese students have the strong desire to return home for the employment,and his local businesses have high requirements for professional practice skills, we encourage and support them to contact local businesses on their own. After contacting with the prospective enterprise, the student will submit his company training plan to the school for the approval. These materials include the company practical training plan, parent knowledge books, etc.After the approval, overseas Chinese students will conduct their practical training in overseas enterprises.For objective reasons, the school cannot participate in the guidance all the time, but the school will conduct spot checks and carefully examine teaching materials.

As shown in Fig. 2, this kind of practical training mode is characterized by a close combination of student training and employment intention. But the guidance on the training process cannot be fully completed by school all the time, and we can only make the situation best for the students.

Type 3: Non-Chinese students who want to participate in engineering training should apply to the school. Teachers with full English teaching qualifications also apply to schools. After the selection and determination of the teachers and courses (projects),school sends overseas students invitations to study in China. After foreign students entering the school,we give them short-term training and the teacher concentrates on teaching and practicing for a period of time. After completing the training, the teacher determines the grade according to the course method.The school cooperates with the teacher to complete the student achievement and credit.

Fig. 1 The f rst kind mode of the practical training.

Fig. 2 The second kind mode of the practical training.

As shown in in Fig. 3, this kind is mainly suitable for non-Chinese students. In principle, the school should be dealt with once a year. This contributes greatly to the in fluence of school internationalization.

Fig. 3 The third kind mode of the practical training.

Type 4 The professional teachers of the school combining professional expertise start a business. If the entity enterprise is in the entrepreneurial park near the school which these enterprises have a certain demand for the students, we recommend that these teachers provide specific development programs for students to participate in. In addition, some alumni companies may have similar corporate needs. In this situation, the teacher (alumni) enterprise put forward the scheme of project scheme training. After the examination of the school, it is open to the students to select after the mutual determination, and the students enter the enterprise to train. School teachers mainly guide the project training of enterprises founded by teachers. The project team of the alumni or other enterprises is guided by the technical personnel of the enterprise, and the school conducts the investigation during the training process.

As shown in Fig. 4, this kind of practical training mode is characterized by the close relationship between teachers and students. The students' practical ability has been greatly improved under this special guidance. In this way, teachers are both mentors and employers.

The above mode is the main way of practical training for the software engineering major of overseas Chinese universities. However, in the implementation of practical teaching, we find some problems.

1)Temporal arrangement.

Fig. 4 The fourth kind mode of the practical training.

Part of the university's engineering training is arranged during the summer vacation of the 6th to 7th semester. Students and parents generally understand that during the summer vacation the school arranges some compulsory course, but others have different views. If referring to the practice mode of foreign famous universities such as Waterloo University, we define summer vacation as small semester. This way can enable students, parents, enterprises and society to agree with the practical training and internship arrangement during the summer vacation at the policy system level.

2)Enterprise selection.

Practical enterprises are usually divided into two categories. One kind is the enterprise that the teacher establishes or participates in the establishments, these enterprises set the specific project to the practical training background to absorb the student to participate in the research and development team and even the entrepreneurial team. The other is IT enterprises with training qualifications, which have rich experience in curriculum design and teaching staff. They can provide a complete set of training programs and implementation processes. The enterprises established by the alumni and well-known enterprises with no professional training qualifications also recruit students,but the number is small. It is still difficult to expand such enterprises to participate in the training students[3].

3)Policy guarantee.

Many problems are seldom specified by the school,such as the management, grading, organization of student training; teacher evaluation, workload; the investment and use of related funds[4].

2 The Combined Teaching Model of Course and Practice

In the July 2017，Huaqiao University has hold the colloquium about innovating the mode of talent training. Enhui Yang, Academician of the Canadian royal academy of sciences, has introduced some details about cooperation teaching model of related computer major of Waterloo University. In this mode, the undergraduate of computer major should finish 4 years and 8 months or 14 terms (four months is one term)courses, the first term and the fourteenth term should finish on campus, the other 12 terms should according to the order, which is one term complete course teaching at school and one term should complete practice training in the company. The course of practice training of six terms is the required course. Through the evaluation of company and the practice report to give the mark, the school also arranges teachers to investigate in the company.

Reference to the experience of courses of Waterloo University and combine the reality of overseas Chinese schools of our country, we could set engineering practice courses during the first four summer vacation,sheet will show you details. The three courses are professional innovation and entrepreneurship of foundation practice, advanced practice and comprehensive practice.

The relevant implementation process as follows.

1)Revised training scheme.

The overall training program of software engineering is adjusted. For the course, it is the content needed to be considered about the three practices. And what kinds of knowledge need to be learned through the practice and what extent need to be get etc., need to further discussed by teaching committee of the school or college with this major.

Table 1 A summary of the training courses.

2)Make the enterprise selection scheme

Teaching committee of the school or college need to make and file the selection scheme of professional innovation and entrepreneurship courses. The point is the enterprises and alumni enterprises founded or cofounded by teachers.

3)Formulate the rules about the management of summer vacation practice.

Relevant departments shall work together to formulate relevant teaching management regulations on such practical teaching work which lead by the school administration department. To solving the courses problem, which is involves overseas students how to get credit for the course (including scoring mechanism), retake and recovery the failed course,from course, credit, study and so on.

4)Contact the enterprise and post the training information.

The school should contact enterprise which is interested about the training and post tender documents for practical teaching earlier two months before summer vacation after having the clearing rules.School, the enterprise leader and the human resources department discuss with the enterprise which fits the request about the detail arrangements about the practical teaching.

5)Pre-education before the summer vacation.

When the school ensures the enterprise, they hold the meeting about the propaganda and pre-education to student in the 1 month before summer vacation. The purpose is to make student understand the character,goal, content, process and assessment mechanism of the practical course. And guide them to choose the enterprise which is fit for themselves according to their professional interests.

6)Inspection.

After the student start to learning practicing courses at the enterprise during summer vacation, The school will arrange teacher to go to enterprises to carry out the inspection for knowing the problems of student during the learning process, and improve the guiding mechanism and sorting and filing the teaching resources such as the document, video and so on.

7)The gain of grades and credits.

The Gain of grades and credit should follow the relevant regulations of the school, and the school will give the scoring outline and template and refining it to form, and conducting the evaluation according to the contents of the table by the enterprise. The school organizes relevant teachers to grading the answer after the enterprise given the score, through weighting the given score of the enterprise and the answer to grading the student's final score.

8)Regular summary.

Every year the first three weeks of the first semester,the school organizes a symposium to summarize the performance, problems and achievements of students in the last summer practice course. This purpose is that make the students learn from each other and learn more effectively in the practical course of the next summer vacation.

3 The Concrete Arrangement of Practical Project Training

The course needs to make concrete arrangements of the training, such as: the attainment of goals, evaluation system, arrangements of the content and organization mode[5-8].

The attainment of training goals, the detail is as followed[9-11].

(1) Student should understand the current situation and development prospect of IT industry, participating enterprises and the training professional job, and formulate the professional career development plan.

(2) Student should understand the culture and core values of participating enterprises, abide by the rules and regulations related to practical training, integrate into the training enterprise, and form good professional habit.

(3) Student should master the basic knowledge,get basic programming ability on common software and hardware development platform, so that have the personal ability to work and complete task in a team; they should understand the specifications and standards of software development and use them in practical projects; they also should understand and use enterprise-level development, design, and management tools for the development of comprehensive project.

(4) Student should have the ability to using enterprise-level development frameworks and platforms, student should learn to use internet and related tools to solve practical problems in the development process, designing a solution of similar problems. They should understand the large enterprisescale databases, designed means of databases. And submit the design of meeting the requirement of database, they also should master the basic writing method of the SQL, and smoothly writing the SQL code which is required by the project; finally they need understand design ideas and methods of the system, use modeling tools for system analysis and design.

(5) During the training of courses, student need master the knowledge of team collaboration and project management, including task decomposition,version control, and defect management. They should understand the relationship between schedule, quality and cost in project management.

(6) Student should understand the importance of team spirit, communication and expression, improve communication and expression ability, and having the team spirit.

The evaluation of practical training is comprised of periodical test, normal inspection and comprehensive evaluation, the project manager pays attention to the practical application ability of students in teaching process, evaluating the result through programming,database, tools, development, qualities, and so on.

The training content mainly includes[12]:

(1) Student should learn programming language,software engineering, database, software testing basic knowledge. And master the use of development tools,modeling tools, team collaboration tools, test tools, and project management tools;

(2) Student should learn the enterprise software and hardware development framework and components,and apply them into project cases.

(3) Student should learn the frontier and extensional technology, and use it into the actual project.

(4) Student should conduct the development of project cases, and completing the selection of project model, requirement analysis, system design, coding the project, unit test, integration test, and complete design review and project outcome review.

(5) Student should conduct the teaching of professional quality.

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(6) Student should complete the periodical evaluation and comprehensive evaluation.

The above content is mainly aimed to the training course arranged in the third summer vacation. The teaching work committees of the school or college need to further discuss the question which is how should the first two summer courses be decomposed, combined and adjusted.

4 The Conditions of Guarantee for Practical Project Training

1)Position.

In addition to the daily teaching work, at present software engineering major in domestic universities conduct mostly synchronously the certification of engineering education major, the professional certification of IEET, the evaluation of Provincial general higher education undergraduate major, the review and evaluation of undergraduate teaching work and some related work. It is a significant amount of work, but most schools have only one position on teaching secretary or academic staff at the college level,and a few universities have another part-time position.The human resources is so shortage that it has some difficulty in the arrangement of teacher to practical training during the summer vacation.

At the college level, Yanshan University is not only one position on teaching secretary or academic staff,but two or three. There are so many people who have to work, and naturally some work can be arranged into special. Some of the work that was originally done orally can be documented, institutionalized and filed.The input-output ratio is considerable for the teaching work of the college.

To sum up, when the practical training mode proposed in the implementing paper, overseas Chinese schools should fully consider setting up two or more teaching posts at the college level.

2)Policy support.

The training mode proposed the "no summer vacation" teaching mode. It will impact the school teaching management, teachers’ teaching work,students’ learning, and parents’ cognition, and so on.If only at the college, the effect is relatively weak. The school should study and publish the policy document of relevant teaching management according to it.At the same time school should consider relevant personnel salary during the summer vacation, extension problem such as student accommodation during the summer vacation, publish synchronous related policy documents for supporting.

3)Financial support.

In the early stage of school-enterprise cooperation training students, the enterprise may has some doubts,so the school should make full use of teachers’entrepreneurship or alumni companies. However, it should be extended to more companies in the end.This process may require the consideration of paid cooperation between some of companies involved in the early intervention. In addition, the work requires teachers, students, of fice and experiment participating.Therefore, the implemented universities should consider the corresponding work allowance input during the summer vacation.

5 Conclusion

This paper puts forward a new training mode to set up the practical training of school-enterprise cooperation in many short summer terms. It aims at the current situation of Chinese universities in the field of software engineering. It also analyzes the implementation process, the main content of the training and the supporting conditions. It supports great reference value for the cultivation of students of software engineering in universities who recruit overseas students.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the "Emerging Engineering Education" Research and Practice Project and the Key Project of Education and Teaching Reforms of Universities in Fujian Province (No.FBJG20180034).