Variants of Teaching First Course in Database Systems

In order to effectively conduct a course, the instructor should be clear about the course contents, methodology of teaching, and about the relevant literature, mainly, the textbooks. Furthermore, it is imperative to assign appropriate time to each topic so as to conduct the course efficaciously. To assist the Database course instructor in deciding these factors, some ground work has been done, which widely ranges from timely published computer science curricula by ACM and IEEE-CS to the articles published in journals and conferences. The major ingredients for this course are the course contents, and the methodology. Based on the course contents and a selected methodology two other factors are incorporated i.e. which textbooks are more suitable for each methodology, and how much time should be allocated to each topic in each methodology. To this end, we have conducted a survey of the top universities of the world, so as to accumulate relevant data that mainly comprises of the detailed course outlines. We have analyzed this collected data, and have also incorporated our own teaching experience, and as a principal contribution of this article we present a consolidated course content domain along with relevant learning outcomes, and different methodologies that can be used for teaching an elementary course in database systems.