A perspective on three cooperating courses

Multidisciplinary education gives students an opportunity to gain real life experience. This experience challenges students to apply their knowledge in a setting which reflects the type of multidisciplinary activities they will be facing in many positions as in the field of software engineering. To foster multidisciplinary interaction, the Texas Tech Computer Science, English, and Marketing Departments worked together in the Spring of 1999. Through a sophomore-level software engineering course, students were grouped into 12 to 17 person teams to work on a project for an external client. The students went through the entire software engineering process from requirements to implementation and placed all documents and software on the World Wide Web. The English students, in a technical writing course, reviewed the documents of the computer science students, conducted usability studies, and wrote the user's manual for the systems. The marketing students, in a graduate level marketing administration course, undertook a strategic analysis. A description of the outcome of the collaboration between the departments is given and lessons learned are emphasized.