Harmonizing a Software Quality Curriculum in a Higher Education Institution by Using Essence
摘要
Higher education institutions are permanently struggling with curriculum harmonization in order to achieve globalization of their courses. Some proposals can be found in the literature for harmonizing the courses with the learning outcomes of the programs, but some problems are still subject to research: (i) some proposals lack methods for curriculum harmonization; (ii) most of the methods (when used) are empirical and subjective; (iii) some proposals are related to macro and mezzo curriculum, leaving behind the micro curriculum. Seeking to overcome the aforementioned problems, our objective in this paper is complementing an existing method based on Quintessence (a non-standard version of the Essence standard) for harmonizing the micro curriculum of a course with the learning outcomes of its program. We also develop a case study of the method with the course “software quality” belonging to the program “systems and informatics engineering” from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Our relevant results are promising, because we can establish an objective relationship between the activities of the course and the elements of the learning outcomes of the program.