Roadmap to Inculcate Complex Problem-Solving Skills in CS/IT Students

IT industries expect critical & analytical thinking, programming skills, domain & technology knowledge and soft skills from CS/IT graduates. There is a need for investigation of outcome-based methods to inculcate complex problem-solving skills among graduates. This paper presents a roadmap for designing student learning outcomes, assessment methods, curriculum and active teaching-learning activities for CS/IT programme. The proposed roadmap incorporates project-based, problem-based and case study based teaching-learning and assessment strategies to address higher Bloom's level. The proposed roadmap of implemented for the 2015- 19 batch of CS&IT department, Rajarambapu Institute of Technology. The case study presents identified 13 student learning outcomes (SLOs) in line with program outcomes and current IT industry expectations. To achieve the SLOs, problem and project-based assessment methods and teaching-learning methods are designed. To calculate the success of the proposed roadmap, students' performance of 2015-19 batch is compared with ancestor batch 2014-18. The effectiveness of the proposed roadmap for inculcating complex problem solving is measured with percentage of higher levels of Bloom's addressed in assessment, attainment of student learning outcomes, attainment of students' employability skills and student's feedback. For all courses, performance of students of batch 2015-19 is better than batch 2014-18. The better performance is shown with highest and median marks. Batch 2015-19 shows better student learning outcomes and employability scores than batch 2014-18. The proposed roadmap is found better on all mentioned measures for inculcating complex problem-solving skills.