[Fsf-friends] A thorough re-vamp of Curriculum at University of Calicut

[doxa at antispam.org]

Friends,
A re-engineering of almost all the practical sessions on Free Software in virtually all the semesters of UG Engineering courses of Computer Sc & Engg (CSE) and Information Technology (IT) at University of Calicut seem to be the most important aspect in the new and revised scheme and syllabi that is to be released soon.

The revision work that took almost a year to finalise had been co-ordinated by Prof Valsaraj, Govt Engg College, Thrissur for IT and Prof Chandrasekhara Pillai, NSS College of Engg, Palakkad for CSE.

The new scheme draws its inspiration from its predecessor, which had been predominantly worked out at NIT-C, Kozhikode in 1999. A new visible change in the outlook of both schemes has a lot to do with the suggested guidelines of Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), wherein CSE concentrates its discipline towards the theoretical aspects while IT focusses on the application domains.

While no major changes were incorporated in the first four semesters for both the disciplines, semesters V to VIII are designed differently with ACM guidelines.

Drastic changes are proposed to be incorporated for the laboratory sessions in all the semesters, as well as for the mini project (sixth semester) and main project (final year), where practices and principles in Free Software engineering domain find strong recommendation for implementation and use. The syllabus even discourages software development in some proprietary domains for mini project and main project.

The revision committee had given a detailed look into the emerging trends in software engineering practices, world over, and had decided to recommend training the young engineering undergraduates to equip themselves with modern practices, most of which are not at all used in the proprietary software engineering domain.

Cheers, 
CK Raju,
Chairman, 
Board of Studies (CSE & IT),
University of Calicut.