DUT & Huawei: A New Model for Software Engineering Education

University-level software engineering programs in China are primarily established to respond to the technological talent needs of the country and enterprises. These major programs aim to cultivate high-caliber engineers across multiple disciplines who have strong innovation capabilities, can adapt to economic and social development requirements, and are able to directly enter professional roles. This initiative in China is part of the country's new industrialization push as it repositions itself as an innovative hub that produces world-class talent. However, R&D and product iteration in the ICT industry is moving at speeds that the education sector struggles to match. The misalignment between software talent and enterprise capability requirements has become a common pain point for universities and enterprises alike.

China's Ministry of Education (MOE) has laid out a blueprint of Emerging Engineering Education (3E) which emphasizes that software engineering majors need to be trained based on the specialized knowledge and dynamic requirements of different fields. Considering the nation's current talent shortage and future development needs, new talent cultivation models that prioritize a solid grasp of fundamental knowledge, key capabilities, subject-matter mastery, and social awareness are needed. This is currently the largest issue facing software engineering education in China.

And so, Dalian University of Technology (DUT) and Huawei decided to partner up to address this issue.

Reshaping core curricula

Based on the Huawei ICT Academy model, DUT integrated technologies like GaussDB database, Huawei Cloud Computing, AI, big data, and openEuler into their software engineering courses and decided to emphasize knowledge acquisition, thinking, capabilities, and competency in their curriculum. At the same time, we also focused on shaping student's mindsets, instilling in them a sense of social responsibility and a spirit of innovation – something that Huawei shares. We have also fostered a deeper relationship between the university and Huawei in terms of our training goals, resources, and teachers. Our program highlights cutting-edge theories and their applications, is driven by mission, and is backed by a quantitative and controllable software talent quality assurance system. We aim to cultivate talent that can solve the problems related to the most critical technologies and we want our students to be able to innovate continuously and adapt to the rapid industry development. Figure 1 illustrates our educational philosophy.

Software technologies are often linked to advanced theory. After introducing Huawei Kunpeng and its cutting-edge resources and technologies to our curriculum, we reconstructed our core course cluster, broke down the enterprise's advanced skill system and integrated it into our own, and accordingly aligned the technologies with corresponding courses (see Figure 2).

By reshaping the core course cluster through the university-enterprise integration initiative, DUT has developed enterprise-level practice cases that are woven directly into our curriculum. This allows us to cultivate students' ability to identify and solve problems at different levels through progressive practice projects.

We have also designed teaching content that facilitates tiered, progressive learning, starting from the fundamentals and aiming for higher-level goals (see Figure 3). We set clear capability development paths for students and show how they can progress through a series of concrete, but challenging, goals. These development paths cater to both students who are starting from scratch and students who are at the later stages of their education. This way, our course cluster helps students realize personalized, differentiated learning goals.

Igniting interests

Most of our current students are from the post-2000's generation, and many are passionate about gaming. This inspired DUT to approach teaching from a different angle: Instead of ignoring or downplaying the role of gaming, why don't we turn it into a positive example that can guide our students? This student-centric mindset means we are looking at things from our students' perspective. In games, they often assume different roles, and they often work in teams to reach higher levels. In addition, the positive feedback loop they experience when leveling up in the game and seeing their rankings rise also provides a direct reward mechanism that drives them forward.

So, DUT synthesized these knowledge points into soft skills, engineering capabilities, and innovation capabilities. From there, we designed our development paths to function more like they would in a game. We broke the capabilities down into eight levels. Each level is then divided into tasks of varying degrees of difficulty, and the tasks are accordingly labeled as beginner, intermediate, or advanced tasks (see Figure 4).

Figure 5 shows an example of how we divide tasks by level of difficulty. To complete a login system design task, students only need to use SQL to implement system login according to the textbook requirements.

Another benefit of this game-style course design is that we can quantify more learning data. In this way, we can more easily analyze and assess how well the students are doing and how they are mastering different knowledge points. Then, we can build multi-dimensional learning profiles for each student that incorporate different data points, like their assignment progress, engineering capabilities, project contributions, grades, achievements of each class, and personal achievements. In addition, we created a ranking system to foster an immersive, game-like experience where the students are encouraged to learn from and compete with each other and to excel. Building this learning model is already paying off. About 60,000 students in China have participated in the project.

Multiple wins with the Dalian model

Throughout Huawei and DUT's collaboration, multiple teachers and students have worked with Huawei on real-world problems and three Huawei technical certifications were received in this process. One student has even been directly recruited into Huawei's Top Mind Plan.

This university-enterprise collaboration not only transcends the boundaries between universities and enterprises, but also introduces advanced technologies and methods into teaching practices. It has enabled participants to develop practice cases that encompass entire course clusters, and improve student engagement in innovation through hands-on projects. The collaboration has opened up many opportunities for students looking to participate in high-level competitions and earn professional skill certifications.

In addition, we have woven actual business requirements into our teaching. In our courses, we identify topics that can help solve the most critical technical challenges facing the industry. Teachers and students work together on these topics to find practical solutions. Our Dalian model delivers wins on multiple fronts thanks to this, covering many aspects of university-enterprise collaboration (see Figure 6).

Outstanding innovation achievements

DUT and Huawei have made remarkable achievements through their university-enterprise collaboration projects.

First, the curriculum and teaching materials we developed are being adopted by many universities. Our System Analysis and Design and Compilation Technology were among the first national top-level courses. Java Program Design, Software Engineering, and Database System were recognized as top-level courses in Liaoning province. The national top-level courses we have developed through university-enterprise collaboration have also been launched on multiple platforms, such as iCourse (a leading Chinese university MOOC website), XuetangX (a MOOC platform founded by Tsinghua University), and Huawei Cloud. Nearly 300,000 students and more than 200 universities have used the highly acclaimed courses.

The textbooks jointly produced by DUT and Huawei are among the first textbooks in China to have incorporated proprietary software technology for teaching. The MOE's Software Engineering Teaching Steering Committee also designated these textbooks as approved resources and they have been adopted by many universities and by companies like Huawei. Over 200,000 copies of these textbooks have been printed to date.

During the pandemic from 2020 to 2022, we livestreamed our online courses for students across the country. The streams were lively thanks to the participation of two important cohorts: the industrial cohort of tutors from various enterprises and the academic cohort of teachers from universities. The courses were streamed on multiple platforms, including Douyin, Kuaishou, Huawei Cloud, and Mudu. The programs have been viewed by nearly 60,000 students from more than 100 universities in China, and the MOE named them collectively as one of the nation's top premium courses. Media platforms such as Toutiao and the National University Ideological & Political Work Net have also promoted this program.

In addition, the program has been recognized as an excellent project under the MOE's University-Industry Collaborative Education Program, a best case under the "Double 100" Program for University-Enterprise Collaboration, and as a best practice for the Emerging Engineering Education initiative.

Our second primary achievement has simply been the marked improvement in our students' innovation capabilities. This reflects the effectiveness of our innovative education model. Despite the difficulty of our paper tests increasing every year, the students' average scores also increased instead of decreasing. Our courses are all rated as five-star courses on the iCourse platform and have high self-learning completion rates and goal achievement rates. Most students taking the courses advanced to higher levels in the game setting of the project. 95% of students who have taken these courses have gone on to receive Huawei certifications and the number of DUT graduates recruited by Huawei is also increasing year by year.

We also introduced important competitions into our teaching plans. Student projects are refined through competitions, and students can use the knowledge they have learned to compete in innovation competitions. This helps them prepare for the workforce, apply their knowledge through practice, practice innovation, and become inspired to create more.

Our third main achievement is the success of our innovative teaching model in developing top-level courses and teachers. Over the past three years, the head teacher team of our course development program has been recognized more than 20 times by authoritative institutions. These recognitions include their courses being named the first top-level course in this field in China and a demonstration course for cultivating social responsibility. The team has won the Second Prize of National Teaching Achievements, the First Prize of Provincial Teaching Achievements, the First Prize of the National Teaching Innovation Contest for College Teachers, and the Grand Prize of the National Hybrid Teaching Innovation Competition. Some members of the team were also named Provincial Renowned Teachers and received the Baosteel Excellent Teacher Award. Personally, I have been honored by being named one of the first Huawei developer advocates and a Huawei Certified ICT Expert (HCIE) for AI models, and have won the Huawei Industry-Academia Collaboration Achievement Award as well as an award for the Excellent Teacher of the Intelligent Base program.

Finally, we are extremely proud of the number of teachers and students who have directly benefited from the courses. DUT has been invited to deliver more than 100 specialized reports on this model at events like the Computer Education Conference of China (CECC) and the Computer Education Conference and Emerging Engineering Education Conference. A special booth was also set up at the HUAWEI CONNECT exhibition to promote the achievements of these courses (see Figure 7).

The course we developed on emerging engineering is available on multiple MOOC platforms such as iCourse and Huawei Cloud. Nearly 100,000 students from more than 40 universities in China have taken this course already. It is rated an excellent industry-academy collaboration course on emerging engineering and an excellent project case under the MOE's industry-academy collaboration program. DUT teachers have also published more than 20 papers, one of which won the first prize for papers at the National University Program Design Education Conference in 2023. The in-depth university-enterprise integration model we explored through the development of this course is called the Dalian model by Huawei and is now being widely promoted in universities across China. The head teacher was also recognized as Huawei's Most Valuable Instructor (MVI) and a Huawei advocate.

The collaboration between DUT and Huawei has shifted from being driven by market demand to being driven by China's national strategy for software talent cultivation. This transition has shifted our focus from training professional talent that follows the software industry development to cultivating advanced interdisciplinary talent with independent innovation capabilities. Now, instead of simply pursuing talent cultivation, we are prioritizing both talent cultivation and technical breakthroughs in accordance with national strategic requirements. DUT has reconstructed our curriculum system in multiple ways, including core value education, course content, and practicum. We have compiled a series of textbooks that integrate China's independent software technologies, and instructed students in development software based on the BiSheng compiler, lightweight operating system based on HarmonyOS, and GaussDB database which is based on Kunpeng. The results of these efforts are clear for all to see.

Moving forward, DUT will continue infusing our curricula with Huawei technologies such as their foundation model technology and Cangjie programming language. We look forward to expanding our collaboration with Huawei into more domains and working together to cultivate the innovative software talent that is needed for the future.