Teaching an Online Multi-Institutional Research Level Software Engineering Course with Industry -- an Experience Report

Covid has made online teaching and learning acceptable and students, faculty, and industry professionals are all comfortable with this mode. This comfort can be leveraged to offer an online multi-institutional research-level course in an area where individual institutions may not have the requisite faculty to teach and/or research students to enroll. If the subject is of interest to industry, online offering also allows industry experts to contribute and participate with ease. Advanced topics in Software Engineering are ideally suited for experimenting with this approach as industry, which is often looking to incorporate advances in software engineering in their practices, is likely to agree to contribute and participate. In this paper we describe an experiment in teaching a course titled "AI in Software Engineering" jointly between two institutions with active industry participation, and share our and student's experience. We believe this collaborative teaching approach can be used for offering research level courses in any applied area of computer science by institutions who are small and find it difficult to offer research level courses on their own.