Technology Enhanced Active Learning in Software Engineering

Educating software engineers in software management have long been hard both in academia and in industry. It is extremely difficult to educate software engineering management techniques actively. Historically, we have been quite used to educate in programming in a classroom and in a lab with instructions Teaching any management aspects has been traditionally based on instructions and case studies. We have adopted an active based learning approach to teach final year BSc students in Software Engineering. We let the final year students manage group projects carried out by level 5 students. Mainly, we don't come across a large real-world case study. This work on active learning has changed our way of teaching software engineering and it has made a significant impact on the way the students learning and have been taught traditionally. This research has also proposed an information system model for Technology Enhanced Active Learning and Teaching (ALT) with emphasis on three key principles for teaching Software Engineering: divergent thinking, collaborative learning, and learning through differentiated assessments. More than 90% of students felt they had gained knowledge more quickly with active learning. The ALT model is part of the large scale technology enhanced learning for future learning environments which has been developed adopting most of computer science courses and specialist module.