The Life Cycle of a Cutting-edge Technology Course

A Coaching Experience on Android

∗

Maria J. Blesa, Amalia Duch, Joaquim Gabarr

o and Mar

ıa J. Serna

ALBCOM Research Group

Universitat Polit

ecnica de Catalunya - Barcelona Tech, E-08034 Barcelona, Spain

Keywords:

Android, Programming, New Technologies, Google, Smart Phones, AndroidEDU, Web 3.0.

Abstract:

What is the role that a university should play in the spreading of cutting-edge technologies? It is argued

here that one possibility is to bring focused cutting-edge technology courses in the standard curriculum. It

is contended that such courses have shorter life-spans than conventional subjects and, consequently, their im-

plementation needs to be more dynamic. These claims are backed by discussing the life-cycle of an Android

course running biannually from Spring 2010 to Spring 2013 at Universitat Polit

ecnica de Catalunya. The rise

phase of this course (which lasted two semesters) was a challenging experience that motivated students and

lecturers to play a cooperative and active role in the creation of true working Android applications. The course

held stable for two semesters while student motivation began to fall as smart phones increasingly became ev-

eryday objects. During these two phases the course was offered as extra curricular in the undergraduate phase.

Two added factors were instrumental in the decline (or fall) phase: the availability of on-line information and

the fact that the course became a requirement of a master’s curriculum.

1 INTRODUCTION

Concrete IT technologies shapes our believes and be-

havior (Norman, 1988; Norman, 1998) and in par-

ticular, the media affect the way of teaching (Post-

man, 1984). From an economic point of view, tech-

nological development determines (at least in part)

the role of countries in recent history. In particu-

lar the rise and fall of technological leadership de-

serves careful study (Nelson and Wright, 1992). In

fact, the degree of technological development of a

country seems to be inﬂuenced by the way in which

technology has been taught (see Section B of (Nel-

son and Wright, 1992)). So, the importance of the

role of cutting-edge technology courses is recognized

not only among economists and historians but also

among participants in educational meetings (Frank

and Waren, 1982):

One of the more difﬁcult tasks in this era of

adopting curricula, is to keep a program cur-

rent with technology.

This paper analyzes the complete life-cycle (rise, sta-

bility and decline) of the course: Programming Work-

∗

This work was supported by project 2009-SGR1137

of the Generalitat de Catalunya and grants TIN2012-37930

and TIN2007-66523 of the Spanish Government.

shop on Android Applications for Google Phones

(PWAAGP from now on). This course was a cutting-

edge technology course based on Android and Google

phones. It originates from a synergy between lec-

turers from Universitat Polit

ecnica de Catalunya and

Google. Due to the very special characteristics of

PWAAGP , the life of this course was short (Spring

2010-Spring 2013). Lecturers experienced such a

course as an exciting (sometimes exhausting) expe-

rience in a highly volatile environment and they view

its evolution as a personal challenge. The purpose of

this paper is then to explain why the authors believe

that such a course has necessarily a short life-cycle

life and that its fall is not a failure of the organizers

but a consequence of the intrinsic nature of the course.

Moreover, it is claimed that many of the situations en-

countered in PWAAGP are common to any other IT

cutting-edge technology courses.

To the best of our knowledge, there is information

about the life-cycle of various teaching approaches

using IT technologies as tools (Bryan, 2013). How-

ever, information about the natural life-cycle of

courses on IT cutting-edge technologies is scarce.

159

J. Blesa M., Duch A., Gabarró J. and J. Serna M..

The Life Cycle of a Cutting-edge Technology Course - A Coaching Experience on Android.

DOI: 10.5220/0004841301590166

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 159-166

ISBN: 978-989-758-021-5

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2 CONTEXT AND GOALS

Nowadays it is well established that universities

should be a driving force for innovation. A technical

university is a living and multi-headed organization

and a fundamental issue to considered is how it deals

with cutting-edge technologies and what is the role it

should play in their standardization.

Aware of this fundamental need a team of lectur-

ers (belonging to the ALBCOM research group of the

Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Inform

atics

of the Universitat Polit

ecnica de Catalunya decided to

participate in Google’s AndroidEDU EMEA program

(AndroidEDU EMEA, 2013) in November 2009.

Google launched a call for project proposals to univer-

sities through its AndroidEDU EMEA program (An-

droidEDU EMEA, 2013), the aim of this program

was to promote the development of teaching expe-

riences using the Android operating system for mo-

bile phones. To participate in this program, a uni-

versity site had to submit a proposal for the devel-

opment of an innovative system in mobile engineer-

ing that, requiring a limited number of mobile smart

phones, could be addressed to a broad audience. The

proposed system should also be scalable, and the pro-

posal should promote the practical teaching of com-

puter science issues for students.

The proposal submitted by the authors of this pa-

per was one of the selected ones, and to facilitate

its implementation Google donated 20 smart phones

to the Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes In-

form

atics of the Universitat Polit

ecnica de Catalunya.

This is the origin of the Programming work-

shop on Android applications for Google Phones

(PWAAGP ). Due to the special typology of both the

topic and the students, this course had a life-cycle dif-

ferent from regular technical courses.

This course is used as an example of a focused

cutting-edge technology course with the belief that

the experience obtained on this course is applicable

to other similar cases. It is also claimed here that a

main characteristic of this kind of courses is that they

have a very short life-cycle that corresponds to the

time needed by the technology to spread and become

popular.

The life-cycle of this course is characterized into

three shorter periods that are called rise, stability and,

decline (or fall) and that follow the progression of

Android from cutting-edge IT technology towards its

market take-up.

3 ORIGINAL COURSE

The PWAAGP course started as an extra curricular

subject that could be taken by students from differ-

ent majors or specialties. The quota of students in the

workshop was restricted by the number of phones we

had. PWAAGP was a 4-ECTS

very practical course

that required from enrolled students to have a good

knowledge of Java programming language and a good

general knowledge of algorithms and data structures.

The course ran for ten weeks, and it was scheduled so

that every week a new topic is explained through var-

ious examples and putting special emphasis in their

implementation. Every week, the complexity of the

issues treated was gradually increased.

Having these premises in mind, we ﬁxed the

course contents as described in the following subsec-

tion. Those contents conformed the main elementary

fundamentals on which an application (or App) can be

implemented. Although the contents remained almost

ﬁxed over time, that was not the case for the teaching

strategy and methodology used. Conditioned by how

the proﬁle of the students was changing, and by how

the technology was getting popular, we had to adapt

the way those contents were taught and, consequently,

they way the students were evaluated.

3.1 Contents

The ﬁrst session was dedicated to the installation of

the programming environment and all the develop-

ment tools needed along the course. The applica-

tions and the widgets make up the highest layer in

the project architecture of the Android system. The

second session of the course explored the structure of

these applications and presented more advanced wid-

gets (e.g., static and dynamic lists). The topic of the

third session was location. It included the embedded

use of the GPS, together with the use of some hybrid

web applications combining maps with other types of

information. Session four introduced the SQLite, the

small and powerful SQL database engine included in

Android. SQLite is also used in PHP, iPhone, Skype,

Mozilla Firefox, etc.).

Android inherits the threads directly from the Java

programming language. Threads allow the execution

of several tasks in parallel. This feature is especially

useful when programming mobile phones, where of-

ECTS states for European Credit Transfer System,

which is a standard for comparing the study attainment and

performance of students of higher education across the Eu-

ropean Union and other collaborating European countries.

One academic year corresponds to 60 ECTS-credits that are

equivalent to 1500 − 1800 hours of study.

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160

ten different activities are running at the same time

in the device. Threads also help on doing a more ef-

ﬁcient and user-friendly management of the applica-

tions. Threads were addressed in session ﬁve.

The subject of session six is of particular im-

portance in Android: Intents and Remote Proce-

dure Calls. These effective inter-process communi-

cation mechanisms increase the modularity and inde-

pendence of the processes run by the applications, and

facilitates the reuse and replacement of components.

In addition to its basic utility as phoning device,

smartphones are also used as mobile devices to access

the Internet. The seventh session was dedicated to the

study of external communications by means of the

WebKit browser, HTTP connections, web services,

and Bluetooth. Some fundamental aspects of the

graphic libraries in Android were introduced in the

eighth session. In session nine, the students learned

how to handle phone calls and messages while run-

ning other applications, and how to provide auto-

matic responses to SMS. As a natural conclusion to

the course, the last session was devoted to how to

publish an application on the (formerly called) An-

droid Market, renamed nowadays as Google Play App

Store (Google Play App Store, 2013). Often this ses-

sion was also used to have an invited talk from some-

one working in a mobile communications’ company.

That provided the students with real information, im-

pressions and feedback from the outside world and

allowed them to establish connections with the indus-

try.

It is worth noting that this course was thought as a

general post-intermediate course in programming and

it was not planned for a wide audience. It is interest-

ing to compare the contents of this course with other

proposals. Consider for instance the topics covered

in (Muppala, 2011). Both courses cover roughly the

same topics, however in (Muppala, 2011) much more

emphasis is done in the real-time aspects.

3.2 Material

This course has used a signiﬁcant amount of educa-

tional and support material, including electronic de-

vices, paper books and online material.

Google Phones. The AndroidEDU Program from

Google awarded our course proposal with 10 phones

Android Dev 1, and 10 mobile Phone Nexus

One (HTC G1, 2013; Nexus One, 2013) (see Fig-

ure 1). The Android Dev Phone 1 was a variant of the

HTC T-Mobile G1 designed exclusively as a tool for

application developers to Google’s Android OS. Both

phones run on Android (1.0 Phone in Dev 1 and 2.2

(a) Android Dev Phone 1 (b) Nexus One

Figure 1: Smartphones provided by Google in 2009.

in Nexus One), have Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g), Bluetooth,

quadband GSM radio and USB. The storage ability is

considerably higher in the Nexus One (512MB RAM,

4 GB microSD card) than in the Dev Phone 1 (192MB

RAM, 1 GB microSD card) as well as its processing

power (1 GHz CPU vs. 528 MHz CPU).

Although the Android software development kit

(SDK) includes an acceptably good emulator, the stu-

dents found always very attractive and interesting the

possibility of having real smartphones in their hands

to test their applications. At the ﬁrst editions of the

course, the provided smartphones were of the latest

technology (and therefore quite expensive) and they

were not yet available to the general public. By that

time, not many smartphones were available in the

market. That was a major plus for the course, since

the students were extremely interested in such a novel

hardware and showed themselves eager for knowing

how to program it using Android which, was also

something to discover by that time. However, as the

time passed, smartphones became more powerful and

popular. That happened relatively fast. In a short

time, namely three to four years, our smartphones be-

came old and the students themselves owned better

ones. Also Android established itself as an impor-

tant and well-known system and everyone had heard

about it at the later editions of the course. Thus, both

the hardware and the software involved in the course,

were gradually losing their attraction to the students.

Bibliography. At the ﬁrst edition of the workshop,

there were very few books on Android. The following

ones were used:

• M. Murphy. Beginning Android. Apress Ed. 2009

• Z. Mednieks R. Rogers, J. Lombardo and G.

Blake Meike. Android Application Development.

O’Reilly Media Ed. 2009

Both are very practical, provide a good knowledge

of the Java programming language, and are very fo-

cused on the implementation. They include many dis-

cussions about the code of various applications, and

show how the efﬁciency of the programs can be im-

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161

proved by gradually adapting them to consider the

speciﬁc restrictions imposed by limited memory and

battery life in mobile devices. An important fea-

ture of these two books is that the publishers offer

on the Internet the source code for all programs re-

ferred in them, so it is easy to access the code, to

test it, modify it and reuse it. In our opinion, they

remain still two of the best books to follow for teach-

ing Android. New editions of them exist (Murphy

and Allen, 2011; Rogers et al., 2010). Since 2009,

there was a burst of edited books and e-learning sup-

port material about Android on the Internet (guides,

videos, etc..). Among the recently appeared refer-

ences, it is worth mentioning (Haseman, 2008; Able-

son et al., 2009; Mednieks et al., 2012; Burnette,

2009; Ledford, 2009; Miller, 2008) because of the

quality of their contents.

Another essential online resource for this course

is the Google’s Android Developer’s guide (Android

Developers’ Guide, 2013). In 2009, this guide was

very scarce in contents and very chaotic, which made

it often difﬁcult to ﬁnd speciﬁc information. Nowa-

days, the guide is very complete and describes basi-

cally all what can be done with Android in a very well

organized way. The examples documented therein are

also very appropriate.

Website and Online Forum All the contents and

materials of the course, as well as projects from

previous editions of the course can be found at

http://albcom.lsi.upc.edu/tpaagp/. An online

forum for students and teachers can also be found.

3.3 Evaluation

The evaluation of the students was divided into two

parts: a part of continuous assessment and the evalua-

tion of a ﬁnal project. Although these two parts were

always present, the way they were brought into prac-

tice had to be adapted because the proﬁle of the stu-

dents, the technology and the relation between them

both, changed in the meanwhile.

Apart from introducing our students to Android,

this course was aimed for enhancing them to other im-

portant abilities. For example, to work in groups, to

develop a big project in a continuous and progressive

way, to discuss troubles and their solutions, to brain-

storm, to defend their work in English to a wider audi-

ence, to promote their work in social media platforms,

etc. For working up these goals into practice, students

were always asked to work in 2-3 people teams.

Continuous Assessment. At the end of each ses-

sion, a programming exercise was left as homework

to be solved for the next session. In order to provide

the students with a general overview of the different

parts conforming a non-trivial Android application,

the exercise left as homework one week was, as far

as possible, an extension of the one from the previ-

ous week. At every session, one team presented how

did they solved the homework, and their solution was

discussed among all the other students and teachers.

For evaluating this part, it was weekly taken into

account how the homework was done, how did the

students publicaly present their solutions to their col-

leagues, and also their ability to discuss and defend

their solutions to the problems found.

Final Projects. The students were also asked to

develop a ﬁnal project. The ﬁnal projects were of

greater difﬁculty than the exercises performed along

the course, and each team is assigned with a differ-

ent one. Usually the ﬁnal projects were proposed by

the lecturers, although we exceptionally agreed some-

times on projects proposed by students. The teams

had approximately two months to work on them. Dur-

ing that time no more pressential sessions of the work-

shop were scheduled.

For the evaluation of the ﬁnal project, the students

had to provide the programming code of the devel-

oped application, and a technical report about it. They

also had to make a public oral presentation of their

project in which they explained to their colleagues

how they designed and programmed their application,

which problems they found, how they solved them,

etc. In that presentation, they also had to show that

their application was properly installed and success-

fully running in their phones. In the ﬁrst editions

of the course, the students were also asked to ﬁlm a

video in which they promoted their application to a

broader audience. Those videos are available in an

dedicated channel on YouTube. All the material to be

evaluated had to be in English.

We brieﬂy explain below some of the projects un-

dertaken to date. More information about them and

all the other projects can be found at the website of

the course.

Our city, Barcelona, is a metropolis with more

than 1.5 million inhabitants, within a urban area of

4.5 million people. Moreover, it gets around 7 million

tourists every year. That was always an inspiring sce-

nario for us when thinking about projects to propose

to the students. The proposed projects were aimed

to help, by means of the mobile technology, manage

some important city services as, for example, the bike

rental service, car parking, car sharing, taxi ﬁnder,

etc., and supporting and promoting the tourism. It

is worth to highlight that most of the Apps resulting

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from these projects were a big novelty by the time

they were developed, e.g.:

• gBicing. The Bicing system for bike rentals has

been a quite successful idea that has considerably

increased the mobility within Barcelona in an eco-

logical and sustainable way. This application al-

lows to manage in real time the location and oc-

cupancy of the Bicing’s bike stations.

• Easy Parking. This application helps the user to

ﬁnd it by means of the GPS coordinates of the car

location and the use of Google Maps. When shar-

ing the car with friends, the application gives the

possibility to determine whether the car is avail-

able and an estimation of the time to retrieve it.

Furthermore, this application allows to reserve the

car for a period of time.

• Guide and vote. This application guides the user

along his visit to a site and the several points-

of-interest in it. Each point of interest is ranked

according to the interest of its previous visitors.

Once visited, the user can also vote himself.

Another type of projects were those implementing in-

teractive games. Projects implementing some games

were always welcomed by the students. They were

always aimed to be played by a group of people and

in a distributed way, which is quite of a novelty. E.g.:

• Distributed Tetris. Tetris is probably the most

popular puzzle video game ever. This applica-

tion allows to play Tetris in a distributed way by

using radio-based communication. Not only one,

but several players play the same game against the

machine, and so they share the same board and

have full information about the game.

4 LIFE-CYCLE

In this section, the three phases detected in the life-

cycle of the PWAAGP course are described. They

deﬁne the natural evolution of the course along six

semesters, with a total amount of hundred student in-

scribed in it.

4.1 Phase 1: Rise

Covers the period from Spring 2010 to Fall 2010.

Starts with the participation in the AndroidEDU

EMEA program. It is offered as an elective subject

opened to all undergraduate students. This period has

its own sociological points.

• Lecturers, most of them teaching programming

courses, are far from to be familiar with An-

droid. They aim to socialize Android (open code)

as an alternative to the Apple-iPhone perspective.

There are very few books and the web pages are

incomplete and change quickly. As information is

difﬁcult to obtain, lecturers introduce the material

in formal lectures. The amount of work required

to prepare a lecture is signiﬁcant.

• Students don’t have smart phones. They appre-

ciate very much the opportunity to work with a

real mobile phone (provided by the university).

The class-group is quite heterogeneous contain-

ing computer science and telecommunications en-

gineers. Students are highly motivated and be-

come good friends. The relationship between

computer scientists and telecommunications en-

gineers is excellent. Some students believe that

good skills in Android can help them ﬁnd inter-

esting jobs.

• Relationship between students and lecturers is

very good. Students accept quite well the limited

Android capabilities of the lecturers to teach some

topics or to solve some speciﬁc problem. They

are very collaborative and help to solve problems.

The chat of the course is a fundamental commu-

nication channel.

• The evaluation is project oriented. The project is

proposed at the end of the training process. As the

project is ”something new” it involves an impor-

tant amount of extra work.

4.2 Phase 2: Stability

Covers the period from Spring 2011 to Fall 2011.

PWAAGP is also offered as an elective subject.

• As web information and books about Android be-

come more popular, regular lectures become less

and less important. Students continue to be highly

motivated. Slowly they become much more in-

dependent of the formal lectures and autonomous

learning becomes more and more important. For-

mal lectures begin to disappear because students

ﬁnd them redundant. The role of the lecturers shift

to the organizational aspects of the course.

4.3 Phase 3: Decline

Corresponds to the period from Spring 2012 to Spring

2013. Many factors contribute to the decline of this

course. First of all the smart phones become a com-

modity. Getting information about Android is much

more easy. For instance, several student associations

offer Android courses. On the other hand, as it was a

“successful” course, the lecturers were asked to adapt

it to the standard continuous evaluation of optional

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163

courses so as to integrate it in the near future in a

master curricula. The course was lately offered as a

elective course in a computer science master degree.

• Formal lectures disappear because most students

ﬁnd them redundant. The role of lecturers become

mostly supervising. The course is reorganized as

lab sessions. The session assignments are highly

guided. Less free-room for creativity.

• Evaluation continues to be project oriented. The

project is cut in small parts and the different parts

have to be completed along the course. At the

end of the course only an integration remains to

be done. The number of good projects fall rather

radically.

5 RESULTS

The grades of the students in each term have an impor-

tant correlation with the three stages of the life-cycle

of this course, as seen in Table 1.

Rise. One can see in the ﬁrst two rows of Table 1

that most of the enrolled students have completed the

ﬁnal project with excellent results, very few of them

did not work as expected and for unknown reasons

some of them abandoned the course (the lecturers sus-

pect that this was due to the signiﬁcant workload re-

quired). Given these results and the feedback received

from the students of these two editions of the course it

can be said that they had a positive overall assessment

of the course and in particular they:

• found the course contents new and interesting,

• liked to have teachers that guide the search for

knowledge more than experts in the ﬁeld,

• appreciated the research required by the subject,

• found the support material good and appropriate,

• appreciated the existence of weekly exercises,

• agreed with the method of assessment,

• enjoyed the ﬁnal projects and found them interest-

ing and of appropriate difﬁculty and,

• were convinced that the course provided useful

knowledge for their future careers.

In general, the results indicate, in our opinion, that

a high interest in the subject of study compensated

non-experienced lecturers and/or non-sophisticated

assessment mechanisms. For lecturers, the results ob-

served exceeded by far their expectations. First, stu-

dents were much more proactive and motivated than

they usually are in other more conventional courses,

which resulted in student projects of high quality, both

in their contents and in their presentation. Second,

there was an interesting change of role for the lec-

turers, who were acting as a learning coaches rather

than as conventional lecturers. Third, the use of new

technologies in this workshop brought new insights

to classical computer science contents such as algo-

rithmic schemes and data structures. In view of the

results obtained, new technologies have shown to be

a very useful motivating element for teaching that,

in our opinion, is still unexploited. This experience

forced us to take new positions and educational chal-

lenges. From the viewpoint of the university, this

course give us the opportunity to develop university-

industry relations.

Stability. The third and fourth rows of Table 1 (in

sepia) correspond to the results of what was called

the stability phase. In contrast with the results of the

rise phase, almost all the students have excellent ﬁ-

nal projects–specially in the edition of Fall 2011, so

that, it is impossible to grade any of them with hon-

ors (MH) since it was impossible to distinguish a best

project among all of them. For the whole phase, only

one student failed and six of them dropped-out. How-

ever, even if in Fall 2011 there is a peak in students

performance, they were not as motivated as before.

For lecturers these symptoms suggested that the

course workload was heavy and did not correspond

to the number of credits students were granted. At

this point, lecturers decided to change the evaluation

method and the course entered in its decline phase.

Decline. Instead of grading a big ﬁnal project at the

end of the term, lecturers decided to grade, the con-

tinuous development of a single project (the same for

all students) that was appropriately divided in mod-

ules to be delivered weekly. The notes of the students

when this evaluation method was just established cor-

responds to Row 5 in Table 1 (the ﬁrst in brown).

There it can be seen clearly that the notes are divided

into two groups: the students that performed the min-

imum effort just to pass the course and the ones that

were really motivated and wanted to obtain the max-

imum grade. And this marked the end of the course

since in Fall 2012 it was not offered and in Spring

2013 it became an optional master course, only 5 stu-

dents enrolled and their interest was very limited, as

shown in the last row of Table 1.

6 LESSONS LEARNED

What has been discussed so far is a six semester ex-

perience with a course on Android as an example of

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164

Table 1: Statistics of the PWAAGP course. In each column it is reported the number of students that obtained the corre-

sponding grade (going from sufﬁcient (S) to honors (MH).

teaching cutting-edge technologies. Although this ex-

perience was inﬂuenced by particular circumstances

depending on the prevailing university context, tim-

ings, students, and work team, one can extract the fol-

lowing lessons:

Lesson 1. Technical Universities Should Play a

Role in the Dissemination of Cutting-edge Tech-

nologies. Nowadays it is well-acknowledged that

universities are expected to collaborate with leading

ﬁrms in technology-transfer projects and public funds

are usually available to this end. Cutting-edge tech-

nologies courses are a great opportunity to achieve

this kind of collaboration and to promote the dis-

semination of new technologies. This collaboration

is advantageous for universities because they can get

free access to equipment, motivation for its students

and lecturers, social visibility, and so on. Leading

companies also beneﬁt from cutting edge technology

courses, since they get, among other things, feed-

back on products from researchers and good students,

new and fresh ideas and proposals (from course pro-

totypes), adept future engineers and public visibility.

Lesson 2. Universities Should Provide Flexible

Structures to Include Short Life-cycle Courses.

Our experience shows that the beneﬁts of early adop-

tion of technology are substantial but returns dimin-

ish rather quickly. Many universities (e.g., ours)

have convoluted procedures for curriculum change—

elaborate proposals, ﬁxed and infrequent submission

deadlines, several committees. It will be difﬁcult to

bring cutting-edge technology in the classroom un-

less some sort of ad-hoc technology-adoption policy

that makes short life-cycle subjects easier to approve,

implement and update is put in place.

Lesson 3. Lecturers Should Watch for Challenging

Teaching Opportunities. From Lessons 1 and 2,

it is a natural consequence that the right way to in-

troduce cutting-edge technologies courses maintain-

ing their dynamism is bottom-up. Therefore it corre-

sponds to lecturers and leading technological ﬁrms to

look for collaboration opportunities with the goal of

disseminating promising technologies.

Lesson 4. Cutting-edge Technology Courses Are

Extremely Dynamic. In Spring 2010, Android was

emerging as a new operating system and at that time

it could be considered as a cutting-edge technology

but after three short years it was no longer the case.

Now, Android is, a standard operating system (in fact,

the most used) for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs

. This standardization was accompanied by several

factors: (a) The phones received quickly became ob-

solete and, soon, students began to own their own

phones; (b) courses on Android mushroomed in inter-

net, companies and, academies; (c) Abundant infor-

mation became available in several formats (books,

web-pages, web-sites, etc.); (d) Several companies

developing mobile applications emerged; and (e), Be-

ing proﬁcient in Android passed from being a plus to

being a requirement.

Lesson 5. A Life-cycle Appears to Exist. As

shown in this paper, in only six editions the course

completed its life-cycle. One can see that this life-

cycle matched the evolution of Android from cutting-

edge to a market standard. In fact, this case suggests

that the life-cycle of college courses that introduce a

cutting-edge technology is linked to the progression

of the technology towards its market take-up. The

claim is that cutting-edge technology courses should

form part of college curricula, but always being aware

that their life-cycle is short and dictated by the stan-

dardization of the technology.

Lesson 6. Motivation Changes. During the rise

phase of this course, Google was keen on the dis-

semination of Android among college students, the

students were highly motivated and well-disposed to

learn and committed substantial amount of time to

this purpose. Lecturers were motivated also by, both,

the challenges of learning and teaching Android and

the commitment of students. This situation was kept

for a couple of semesters until students ceased to see

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this knowledge as an advantage (for instance for get-

ting a job). and became less inclined to follow the

guide of teachers who couldn’t keep up with the pace

of that technology. From the lecturers point of view,

updating course contents from one semester to the

next, involved a substantial amount of work that had a

modest lasting value, minor recognition from the uni-

versity and, at the end, no recognition from students.

7 CONCLUSIONS AND OPEN

QUESTIONS

An experience teaching a course on Android appli-

cations for Google Phones is presented. The course

originated from the AndroidEDU program at 2009

providing an interesting interplay between the univer-

sity and private IT ﬁrms as Google.

This course exhibited three stages: rise, stability

and fall. The experience spanned six semesters, coin-

ciding with the introduction, expansion and popular-

ization of Android as a cutting-edge technology. The

lessons learned along this period are summarized in a

previous section.

The last stage of this course (accompanied with

a loss of students’ interest) has been attributed to a

life-cycle that coincides with the standardization of

cutting edge technologies, in this case of the Android

system. Although this is a possible conclusion sup-

ported by the development of the course, other alter-

natives, such as lecturers’ choices and actions taken

to change and adapt the course to the new environ-

ment, may also explain the phenomenon. In such a

case several open questions arise: how should lec-

turers and course designers adapt to the transforma-

tion of a cutting edge technology into a mainstream

one? How should universities accompany this pro-

cess? What role should IT ﬁrms play?

Although not conclusive, student assessments

support the main features of the life-cycle. In the

future, more accurate student assessments should be

designed and applied for the duration of the course in

order to be conclusive.

It is also claimed, that the life-cycle described in

this work is common to every cutting edge technol-

ogy course, but, a comparison with other cutting edge

technologies courses is still to be done. This effort

may be supported by knowledge on diffusion of inno-

vations (Rogers, 2003).

One of the assets of the experience here described

is the integrative nature of the contents of this course

(also noted by (Muppala, 2011)) it remains to be ex-

plored how similar integrative beneﬁts can be brought

into main stream courses and with types of content.

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