Former students' views on the usefulness of conceptual modeling education

Abstract

A big challenge for education and research in Requirements Engineering and Conceptual Modeling (RE/CM) is the need for much more empirical research about the use in practice of RE/CM, including the practical impact of CM education. Former students of RE/CM are potential prescriptors of the RE/CM concepts, methodologies and tools that they have learnt, but they are also conditioned by the current use of those same issues in practice. In this paper we focus on the views that former students of a RE/CM course have, now as young professionals, on the usefulness of the received CM education. We have surveyed over 70 former students to know their opinions on the usefulness of the education on a representative set of CM artifacts. Our results show that our former students find quite useful in general their received CM education, with different usefulness degrees for the various learned artifacts.