Improving monitoring and evaluation of undergraduate curriculum: A case of Software Requirements Engineering course

Curriculum and its operative application have always been of key importance in educational system and its significance increases when it comes to higher education. The importance of an efficient and effective curriculum is acknowledged in recent studies, but the mechanisms used for preparation of curriculum are still human-intensive, tedious, and ineffective. There is a need to follow systematic and methodological approach to design curricula that is compliant with the standard bodies of knowledge. We aim to design a new approach for enabling Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to effectively monitor and evaluate existing undergraduate curricula against a standard body of knowledge. This study is part of a large research project where Software Requirements Engineering (SRE) course has been taken as a test case to empirically validate the proposed approach. A standard, reusable, and extendable concept map of SRE using the SRE Knowledge Area (KA) of the software engineering body of knowledge (SWEBOK) has been constructed. We have performed qualitatively analysis of the undergraduate SRE course of three universities to check their compliance with standard SRE knowledge. We have followed a semi-automated approach to identify missing concepts, analyze the hierarchical organization of concepts, and present misconceptions among concepts in the SRE course. The knowledge inferred from this process will be useful for HEIs to effectively monitor and evaluate SRE course.