Collaborative and role‐play strategies in software engineering learning with web 2.0 tools

Abstract

Software development processes are inherently complex and require the collaboration and coordination of expert teams. The acquisition of both analysis and design competences as well as social skills should thus be the leitmotiv of courses devoted to software engineering learning. However, these aspects are often ignored and excessive importance is attached to the implementation stage. The learning framework described in this article was designed to teach students these competences and skills by means of an immersive learning experience where, working in a team, each student has to play the role of a software developer and address problems linked to requirements specification, design, and the software development process as a whole. Collaborative strategies of this kind have proven to be very successful in active learning processes, to which we have added continuous assessment mechanisms based on rubrics to provide early feedback to students. Additionally, and taking into account the characteristics of the new European Space for Higher Education, we have designed an online personal learning environment (PLE) that facilitates anytime-anywhere communications and provides a suitable social space for the exchange of information, which is crucial to the success of any teamwork effort. More specifically, we propose a learning activity based on Web 2.0 services and adapted to this particular PLE. ß

Analysis of competence acquisition in a flipped classroom approach

“…It is considered by some authors as a starting point for “university level pedagogy” to value development of competences as much as the acquisition of knowledge . According to , learning strategies using online personal learning environment have proven to be very successful to foster the students' acquisition of competences as well as social skills.…”

Knowledge transfer of software tool development for functional requirements analysis

“…In Table 1, we summarize the comparison between these works [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and this paper. In Table 1, we summarize the comparison between these works [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and this paper.…”

Design and evaluation of a cognitive system to teach software change control

“…The proposed learning activity combines the Project Based Learning (PBL) and role‐playing approaches. PBL is currently the teaching tendency . The importance of this approach to software engineering teaching was underlined by [13,14], for example.…”

“…The latter is not new in education. The main objectives of role‐playing are: enhancing students’ decision making skills, increasing their motivation, ameliorating their communication and teamwork [9,32], and improving their acquisition of new concepts . Role‐playing in the software engineering education was used in to teach students necessary practices and techniques of software product line development, that is, how to create families of software systems out of a basic set of reusable software components.…”