Educator Perceptions of DevOps Teaching Recommendations and Their Alignment with Common Challenges

DevOps education presents unique pedagogical challenges due to the diversity of tools, rapid technological change, and the multidisciplinary nature of the field. Although previous work has proposed recommendations to address these challenges, it is unclear how educators perceive these recommendations and whether they align with the challenges encountered in practice. In this paper, we present a mixed methods study involving 11 DevOps educators who interacted with Improve, a tool that presents a curated set of educational challenges and recommendations derived from previous literature. Educators indicated which recommendations they already use, which they intend to use, and which challenges they experience and are motivated to address. Our findings show that 22.6% of the recommendations were new to educators and considered potentially useful, while 59.2% were already in use. Additionally, 66.3% of the challenges were considered relevant, with most of them having linked recommendations that educators were already using or willing to adopt. This study provides empirical insights into the perceived usefulness of existing recommendations, identifies gaps in challenge-recommendation mappings, and supports future efforts to design and disseminate more targeted educational guidance for DevOps teaching.DevOps教育因工具品类繁杂、技术更迭迅猛，且该领域兼具多学科特性，故而面临独特的教学法挑战。尽管既往研究已针对这些挑战提出应对建议，但目前尚不明确教育者对这些建议的认知态度，以及这些建议是否与实际教学中遭遇的难题相契合。本研究采用混合方法研究范式，调研了11名DevOps教育工作者，参与者与名为Improve的工具完成交互——该工具整合了从既往研究文献中提炼的精选教学挑战与对应解决方案建议。教育者需明确标注自身已应用的建议、计划采纳的建议，以及自身遭遇且有意愿攻克的教学挑战。研究结果显示，22.6%的建议对教育者而言属于全新内容且被认为具备潜在应用价值，另有59.2%的建议已被教育者实际采用。此外，66.3%的教学挑战被认定具有现实关联性，其中绝大多数对应的建议已被教育者使用或拟采纳。本研究为现有建议的感知应用价值提供了实证洞察，识别出挑战-建议匹配机制中存在的空白，并可为未来设计并推广更具针对性的DevOps教学指导方案提供支撑。