In today’s technological environment, models play a major role in understanding business needs, in requirement elicitation, and in software development. To facilitate this activities, in the past decades many modeling languages such as UCM (for requirements), BPMN (for business process modeling) and the UML (for software development) were increasingly introduced both in the academia and in practice. Nevertheless, the use of these models and modeling languages is limited. Arguably, a contributory factor limiting the use of modelling is the lack of appropriate educational resources.

To better understand the gaps and to propose solutions for the existed problems the Educators' Symposium at MODELS 2015 aims at addressing the challenges, techniques and best practices involved in teaching modeling technologies to various stakeholders. In particular, we are interested in topics related to (but not limited to) the following:

• Topics to be included in modeling education and at what stages.
• Tool support for teaching modeling.
• Challenges in teaching modeling:
  • Weaving modeling courses into distance learning environment.
  • How to engage students into modeling?
  • Use of appropriate and novel assessment techniques.
  • Use of appropriate and novel modeling technologies to enrich the student experience.
  • Ensuring that theory and practice are balanced in modeling teaching.
  • Exploiting innovative teaching methods in order to enhance the student learning experience.
  • Exploiting effective learning and teaching mechanisms for distance learning.
• Research methods in modeling education.
• Practitioner viewpoint on modeling education.

Special theme: Modeling in the Curriculum

Formal and informal modeling is an essential part of the software and system development process. For a number of years it has been part of the core undergraduate and post graduate curriculum. The standard form of modeling in the curriculum is to teach a standard notation such as UML or BMPN as part of design or alongside object-oriented programming. The ACM Computer Science Curriculum 2013 includes modeling both as an individual component and as an approach that supports other parts of the curriculum. However, apart from identifying abstraction and simulation as features of modeling, the ACM document does not provide any help to the curriculum designer regarding many useful aspects including:

• Foundations of modelling
• Pedagogy of modelling
• Modelling technologies
• Modelling methodologies
• Modelling application areas

Course designers will use a modelling curriculum across all undergraduate and postgraduate disciplines related to Computer Science, Software Engineering and Information Systems.

The Modelling Curriculum track of the 2015 Educators Symposium will take the form of presentations of ideas submitted as short papers and which are deemed in-scope by the organisers. All symposium participants will be invited to discuss the ideas in an open session that will produce a plan to take the Modelling Curriculum forward as a draft publication in the planned symposium journal special issue.

Submission

Submissions must adhere to the IEEE formatting instructions:

• LaTeX users: please use the LaTeX class file IEEEtran v1.8 with the following configuration (without option 'compsoc' or 'compsocconf'):
  \documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}
• Word users: please use this Word template (see also the corresponding PDF file)

All submissions must be in English.

• Full Papers are expected to contribute research and experience reports and should not exceed 6 pages.
• Short Papers are expected to present position statements addressing the symposium's topics. These papers intend to stimulate discussions on teaching modeling at universities and in industries and should not exceed 4 pages.
• Short papers for the Special Theme track on Modelling in the Curriculum should present ideas that address curriculum topics for discussion. Special Theme track papers are limited to 4 pages.
• All papers have to be submitted electronically in pdf format via Easychair at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=edusymp2015

All papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. The paper selection process will be based on the novelty of the ideas or solutions, the impact of modeling in software development education, and relevance to the topics of the symposium.

Publication

All papers of the 11th Educators' Symposium @ MODELS 2015 will be published in CEUR. At least one author for each accepted paper must register for the symposium at the MODELS 2015 conference and present the paper. Best papers are expected to be invited to submit an extended version to the Journal of Science Education and Technology, hopefully as a special issue.

Important Dates

• July 17 July 31, 2015: Submission
• August 15, 2015: Acceptance Notification
• September 1, 2015: Camera Ready
• September 26, 2015: Educators' Symposium

Organizers

• Tony Clark (t.n.clark@mdx.ac.uk)
• Arnon Sturm (sturm@bgu.ac.il)

Program Committee

• Mathieu Acher, University of Rennes I / INRIA, France
• Omar Badreddin, Northern Arizona University, USA
• Mira Balaban, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
• Bernd Bruegge, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
• Michel Chaudron, Chalmers & Gothenborg University, Sweden
• Dan Chiorean, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania
• Peter Clarke, Florida International University, USA
• Birgit Demuth, TU Dresden, Germany
• Martin Gogolla, Database Systems Group, University of Bremen, Germany
• Jennifer Horkoff, HCID, City University London, UK
• Gerti Kappel, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• Jan Mendling, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien< Austria
• Richard Paige, University of York, UK
• Iris Reinhartz-Berger, University of Haifa, Israel
• Martina Seidl, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
• Pnina Soffer, University of Haifa, Israel
• Perdita Stevens, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Dave Stikkolorum, Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Netherlands
• Amir Tomer, Kinneret College, Israel