Identifying Higher Software Engineering Education’s Design-Reality Gaps in Rural India

Over the last decade one of the major challenges of the Indian higher education system has been a discrepancy between the skills of computer science graduates and the needs of industry. The majority of India’s private higher education sector is composed of over 38,000 affiliated colleges, most of which are based in rural India. We selected a college in rural India as a representative case to analyze the local computer science curriculum’s implementation using a Design-Reality Gap Analysis. Our examination considers both students’ and professors’ points of view by conducting interviews and observations. Key findings suggest that inadequate professors skills, improperly implemented teaching methods and a missing curriculum evaluation, among others, play a major role in the Indian computer science graduates’ skill deficiency.

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