Research-Led Teaching And Learning Case Study
Case 4: Professor James Noble

For Professor James Noble (pictured) and colleagues in computer science and software development, the cycle from research to teaching can be very short.

"The reality is that leading edge research presented at major conferences such as OOPSLA Ð the annual Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications Conference Ð often quickly ends up in practice and so a couple of years later weÕre teaching it at first year. Often the time cycle is very short."

Like all academics, Professor Noble builds the latest information, findings and perspectives from his own research into his undergraduate courses.

"I brought my research into two courses I taught in the last year. One was an undergraduate second-year course on software design and part of that is one of my main research areas. Likewise a user-interface design course is again directly informed by my research and indeed the textbook we chose for the course was one that I had been involved in reviewing for the author."

While Professor Noble believes his primary research interest should be directed at software design, he has also presented a paper on the teaching of the user-interface design course to an Australasian computer education conference.

But Professor Noble says it is in the Honours programmes that students get to be directly involved in research. It is in these areas that students are required to undertake a full-year project.

"The research they do is collaborative. My research is collaborative with my students and they often come up with the ideas for their projects."

One of Professor NobleÕs Honours students, now doing a PhD, had the results of his Honours research published in a major journal, the Communications of the Association for Computer Machinery. He also recently presented the results at a seminar at an international conference in Glasgow.

Students also gain advantage from the collaborative links between their lecturers and the international research community throughout the world, including entering international competitions.

"I was recently visiting Microsoft Research in Cambridge and they raised an issue I knew one of our Honours students was already well underway in working on. That student is now working with a PhD student from Cambridge University on the project. These are the kinds of research collaborations that our students are regularly involved in and that come about as a result of our international links."

Another former Honours student, now studying for her PhD, was recently awarded research funds by the Ministry of Health to examine how Mori and Pacific people related to the messages on the Quit Programme website. The software design students and their lecturers also share their research at regular meetings and through their website (http://www.elvis.ac.nz), whose name is obscurely linked to their software design laboratory, "Memphis".