A Competence-Oriented Approach to Subject-Matter Didactics for Software Engineering

Instructors not only in higher education are regularly faced with the problem that they need to develop a new course or adapt an existing one to changed requirements. This is especially true for topics related to information technology (IT) due to the fast technological progress. Instructors, however, are not prepared really well for this task since they typically have a professional and educational background in areas different from pedagogy. Therefore, some sort of methodological framework to support the systematic development and refinement of courses would be highly appreciated. This paper presents such a model, called Competence-Oriented Subject-Matter Didactics. This didactical theory builds upon several concepts from general didactics, most notably Klafki’s Didactic Analysis, and combines and extends these concepts. As a proof of concept, Competence-Oriented Subject-Matter Didactics is applied to the refinement of an introductory course on information systems. This case study indicates, among other things, that this theoretical model has the potential to be applicable for course (re-)design in other domains beyond IT as well