International collaboration in SW engineering research projects

Many software engineering research projects are conducted within university computer science and computing departments or colleges. Every computer or computing department has its own experiences, successes or pitfalls in software engineering and software development teaching, which would be useful to share and discuss with the education community. In this paper we discuss the international software engineering research project experiences and results from five years of teaching "Projects in Computer Science" in Computer Information Systems Diploma and "Software Engineering" in Bachelor of Computer Information Systems Degree programs at Okanagan College. The learning of software development in the Diploma as well as software engineering in the Degree programs were synchronized with the practical software development and software engineering projects with real sponsors from industry and academia in small and medium size groups of students (3-6 members in Diploma and 5-11 members in Degree projects). Additionally to industrial projects we introduced a number of software engineering research projects from academia and industry, located worldwide in the last 5 years. Instructors supervised and supported students in the role of sponsors or mediators. Many student groups were able to develop impressive, high quality final engineering and research project applications and systems. The sponsors provided very positive feedback and references for most of the projects. We offered a greater number of real projects for students to select from, including international research projects from the United States, France, Ukraine and Canada. Several student teams chose research projects (as opposed to industrial projects), which will be briefly discussed in this paper.