1. Undergraduate reforms at DMI in Novi Sad Zoran Budimac

2. Reasons  Reforms started in 2002, due to many compromises, left ‘unfinished’  The new University law  Create more attractive studies and to ‘collect’ more students  Make better differentiation between our directions Business informatics (reform it completely) Teaching informatics (reform it completely as business informatics – some courses + methodics, didactics, e-learning,… ‘Basic’ direction (extend it from 4 to 5 years and then cut the fifth year.  All directions were reformed. Here: just informatics, i.e., business informatics

3. Constraints  Our colleagues-mathematicians still think that informatics is the subfield of mathematics  Almost no one likes elective courses “What will happen with me if no one elects my course?”

4. Contents  Procedure  What we did after all  What after  A short glimpse

5. Procedure to reform curricula  ‘Conceptual’ meetings (council, all) (45 days)  Technical meetings (council) (12 days)  Course contents (5 days)  Information dissemination (site, TV show) (5 days)

6. ‘Conceptual’ meetings  Goal: discussion on the course lists, concepts, …  Organization: 1 double meeting every week (council then all), lasting for 3 hours  Formal presentation  After meeting: working groups, circular mails, answering questions, phone calls, lobbying (lobbing), counter presentations, … Where is my course? What shall I teach? More mathematics! Less elective courses!  And then go back (five times) The original idea did not change at all!

7. When it was finished?  After my last presentation containing just three questions. Shall we continue to have studies of informatics or not? Would you like more students of informatics in the future or not? Will you try to reform studies such that above two goals are fulfilled or not?

8. ‘Technical’ meetings  Goal: reviewing once more the number of contact hours, ECTS credits, to check is every course at the right place (esp. if it is the common one for more directions), adjusting the ‘look and feel’ of all directions, linguistical issues, …)  Producing material in 3 different versions!  Organization: 1 meeting every day lasting for 3 hours  Working with a lot of papers

9. ‘Course contents’ meetings  Goal: to put the right contents into every course  Organization: in working groups, just 1 meeting lasting for 1 hour Possible and wanted contents were already discussed during ‘conceptual’ meetings Nevertheless, hard ‘physical’ and organizational activity

10. Dissemination and advertising  Goal: to let people know what we did  Presentation on TV  Organization: 5 meetings every day, preparations, trying demo software, bringing camera-mans, creating the whole scenario with questions of the presenter to us

11. Contents  Procedure  What we did after all  What after  A short glimpse

12. What we did after all? C1:‘Basic’ direction C2:Teacher of informatics C3:Business Informatics

13. Short description C1: - 50% informatics, 50% mathematics C3: - 75% informatics, 25% rest, mathematics specially created - 42% elective courses - “Ethical issues…”, “E-Commerce”, “Multimedia”, “Visual Programming “Desktop publishing”, “Finances”, “Management of software projects”, “Computer networks”, “Web design”, “Compiler construction”, “Object-oriented programming”, “Data Structures and Algorithms”,... C2: - C3 + methodics, didactics, e-learning

14. Essentially shorter studies - 3½  The last year of ‘Business informatics’ Software Engineering4+1+2 u 2 courses taken from the Faculty (biology, gastrology, hotel management, tourism, astro- physics, astronomy, … ) Σ(6+4+5) * Student project III1+0+3 u Diploma thesis 0+15+11

15. Exam  Continual assessment +  Single-part exam at the end (just oral, written, or practical)

16. Elective courses-1  42% 2 are courses from the whole Faculty 3 are student projects (new topics are announced every semester, guests from industry)  Mobile agents  Case based reasoning .net  E-Learning  Advanced techniques of AI…

17. Elective courses-2  3 are software practice (“praktikum”) Web design Visual Programming Desktop publishing Multimedia Symbolic computation Office automation…

18. Elective courses-3  Others 1 from mathematics (Decision theory, Analysis II, Information and coding theory, Applied analysis, Modeling and simulation) 3 from Informatics (SPM, Databases II, Comp. Graphics, IS II, …)

19. Contents  Procedure  What we did after all  What after  A short glimpse

20. “Package”: 5 years → MSc

22. Computer Science Methodics “Package”: 5 years → MSc

23. Why this scheme?  3.5 + 1.5  3 + 2 3 may be too short for engineering-like professions Many are now switching to 3.5 + 1.5 scheme  4 + 1 1 may be too short for MSc studies If MSc thesis is worth 30 ECTS credits, then there is just 1 semester of lectures

24. After the new law is adopted  Unbind courses from semesters and allow free choice  Increase ECTS credits for some course to allow more flexibility

25. Contents  Procedure  What we did after all  What after  A short glimpse A short glimpse