Pan-Institutional Applied Research within Undergraduate and Post-Degree Diploma Teaching Programs

Many undergraduate students’ applied research projects (projects) are conducted within the computer and computing science departments of colleges and universities [24, 36]. Every department has its own experiences, successes and failures in projects and related subjects teaching, which would be helpful to share and discuss with the education community. In this paper, we discuss the pan-institutional applied research projects’ experiences and results of teaching capstone project courses since 2005, upper-level courses in Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Object Analysis and Design, Special Topic Courses in Databases, in the Computer Information Systems (CIS) Diploma, the Bachelor of Computer Information Systems (BCIS) Degree programs at Okanagan College (OC), and the Post Degree Diploma in Data Analytics (PDDDA) program at Langara College (LC), and similar courses at UBC Okanagan and the University of the Fraser Valley [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 17, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 58]. Teaching a new computing science topic was synchronized through practical software development and software engineering (SEng) projects with industrial sponsors and by small groups of students. In addition to industrial projects, we introduced several student-centred applied research projects from academia and industry in British Columbia (BC) and across Canada. In the last 5 years, we initiated collaboration in these student-centred projects between several post-secondary institutions (OC and LC, UBC Okanagan (UBC O), and the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV)) in Canada and internationally in Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC), France. Managers or executives from the sponsoring companies and instructors and professors from the educational institutions supervised and supported students as sponsors, advisors, or mediators. Many student project teams were able to develop impressive, high-quality engineering and research applications and systems [42]. The sponsors provided positive feedback and references for most of the projects. The results of some of these industrial projects were turned into products by the sponsoring companies.