EduCo: an Integrated Social Environment for Teaching and Learning Software Engineering Courses

There have been studies suggesting that collaboration and cooperation can deliver higher performance than competition or individual work. The Web does not only provide ubiquitous access to resources and computation power but also can be an open structure for better and continuous collaboration. In this study, we introduce our vision and construction of an integrated social environment called EduCo to assist teaching and learning software engineering courses. EduCo is a Web environment for instructors to teach and for students to learn and practice designing, programming, and managing software in software engineering courses. It is also a social network platform that helps stimulate participation, interaction, sharing, awareness, accountability, and teamwork. This paper describes the initial construction of the system with many core capabilities realized. The paper also presents our case studies from applying the system to several programming language classes. The results from the case studies suggest that the system has the potential to encourage students' participation and satisfaction. In addition, this paper presents our vision for future enhancements of the system with core capabilities such as feeds, dashboards, notifications, tracking, and reporting.