Designing an Effective Teaching Learning Environment for an Undergraduate Software Engineering Course

Background

The Software Engineering course is offered at the third semester along with Data structures and Object Oriented Programming courses. At this point in time of their Undergraduate degree course, students begin learning the basics of computer systems and leverage them to solve problems. Learners are expected to learn the various aspects of software development and develop applications that suit real needs. Hence it is thought to be ideal to offer the Software Engineering course at this juncture, so that students could develop and test their projects incorporating the standard procedures, guidelines, tools, methods, coding standards, project management aspects and ethical practices imparted as part of the course.

The course was initially offered based on the traditional pedagogical strategy of following the lectures with problem solving activities in and out of the classroom. However, the following shortcomings were found in the traditional content delivery method:

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  Limited in-class and in-lab activities restricted the scope of experimentation by the learners, as there were no well-defined guidelines to carry out off-the-class activities such as requirements gathering and feasibility analysis

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  Lack of adaptation of technology assisted methods to monitor the progress made in off-the-class activities

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  Lack of rubrics to assess how well the learners carried out the offline activities such as client meetings, requirements gatherings, feasibility analysis for developing the application, excluding code development

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  There was very less scope for improving and assessing interpersonal skills of learners while they work in teams offline

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  Lack of Rubrics to assess the managerial and interpersonal skills of learners

The above-mentioned factors led to poor attainment of course outcomes. Hence suitable improvements in the pedagogical strategies were considered for adoption.