Learner-centered software engineering education: From resources to skills and pedagogical patterns

A revolution is taking place in academic and continuing education, one that deals with the philosophy of how we teach and learn, the relationship between educators and Iearners, the way in which the classroom is structured, and the nature of the curriclum. This new approach, termed learner-centered education, is focused on the needs. skills and interests of the learner rather than on the organization of the curriculum content [12,2], This paper describes an approach for identifying critical skills and for designing training material for learner-centered software engineering education. The approach starts from the analysis of the software developer's context Of work, identifies critical skills and then associates relevant learning resources to them. The approach has been successfully used and validated in a real world-training program called PRISE that the first author developed - In French, Programme de Reorientation des Ingenieurs Sans Emploi, a Curriculum fur Retraining Unemployed Engineers in Software Engineering. The approach is being used also in some courses in the Concordia bachelor of software engineering program.