Our curriculum, Information processing Science, has been and is going through big changes. Many courses are put to rest and new ones created. Personally, this means many changes to my teaching portfolio.
Firstly, the course on Embedded Software Development Environments will cease to exist. ESDE, a master level course, was a successor to Mobile systems development course I taught in cooperation with Tampere University of Technology. Even before that, I was involved with mobile development related courses Symbian programming. So the years long track of teaching mobile programming, lately on Android, is now closing for me.
Another master level course disappearing is the Open Source Software Development, where I was responsible for course exercises for the past two years. There the students worked — under my watchful eye — on a distributed Java client-server project hosted in GitHub. The goal of that project was to learn how to communicate and coordinate fixing issues and providing new features to the project by using git: forking, branching, committing and providing pull requests to the main project, following the contribution guides and license terms of the project.
Third course I have a long history with is the Software engineering (BSc) course. My first paid job as a student at the Department of Information Processing Science somewhere around the end of 1980s was to type the handwritten lecture notes of professor Koskela to a Word document. Printouts were then sold as course material by the student guild Blanko. I also taught the course at the Open University, travelling to many cities and villages in Northern Finland for Friday night and Saturday lecturing sessions. Later, I was responsible for the course and the development of it for many years. The course is now changed from a 2nd study year course, integrating previous courses’ content before practical software project, to an introductory course in the first study year. Others will take charge.
Finally, I have decided to leave the Software architectures course. This 2nd year bachelor level course also has a long history of cooperation with Tampere University of Technology. The course is their making, based on their significant research on software architectures. At some point, I decided to take the exercises here in Oulu to more practical direction, studying source code of existing distributed systems and transforming the architecture based on new functional and non-functional requirements. In my opinion, this approach better illustrates the practical significance of various architectural solutions and the purpose of architectural diagrams, than just drawing pictures without any concrete connection to actual source code. The cooperation with TUT ceased some years ago but since their material was open sourced, I continued to use the lecture slides (updated by me yearly) with my own exercises and exercise projects.
Leaving now these courses behind, I will return back to teaching programming courses in bachelor level. I will take charge of Data structures and algorithms course, and will spend a considerable amount of teaching hours on a new course on server side app development. There is also one new course in the master level on platforms and ecosystems I am participating in, but the course is in the very early stages of development, so not much to say about that yet.