Research and teaching strategies integration at post-secondary programs

In this paper, we describe the integration of research and teaching strategies into computer science and engineering departments at universities and colleges. A significant amount of current software engineering research is conducted within the context of computer science, computing and engineering departments or colleges. Similarly, computer and computing science, electrical and software engineering degree programs are being developed by such academic units as well as within engineering colleges. However, every computer or engineering department has its own experiences, successes or pitfalls in software engineering and software development teaching and student research integration, which would be useful to share and discuss with the education community. In this paper we discuss the experiences and results from five years of teaching Software Engineering (SE) and Projects in Computer Science (PCS) in Computer Information Systems (CIS) diploma and Bachelor of Computer Information Systems (BCIS) degree programs at Okanagan College (OC). Also we provide possible ways of integrating research and teaching strategies into computer science departments at universities and colleges as well as our preliminary results.