A Senior “Real World” Project Class—It Works
Herbert F. Rebhun, Ph.D.
University of Houston-Downtown
Abstract
The Computer Information System (CIS) major at the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) has had a standard capstone course for all CIS majors for over 20 years. This course has been very successful in requiring the students to utilize all the previous CIS programming courses and almost all of their business courses to create various projects (on their own) with various businesses in the greater Houston area.
Even with the downturn in those majoring in CIS (formerly the largest major in the university) the senior project course—(CIS 4312—Systems Development Project) has continued to be positively received by the student, the professor, and the business client. One of the advantages of UHD is that the potential client base for any student at any time is large.
Using several years of student-project information forms completed by students while enrolled in CIS 4312, the author developed a series of distribution lists and entered CIS students’ (now a graduate of UHD) name and e-mail address. A request for Help letter along with a survey was emailed to 377 CIS alumina asking them to comment on the use (or lack of use) of the senior project notebook, also referred to as senior project portfolio, which is created during project development in CIS 4312. This presentation addresses the result of the survey.