Software engineering education: Challenges and perspectives

The software engineering community celebrated, in 2018, the 50th anniversary of what is considered to be the official start of the profession of software engineering. Software engineering is a young and promising discipline which is still under development and improvement. This is reflected when teaching software engineering in higher education. The aim of this study is to investigate the challenges and perspectives of software engineering education. To do so, a questionnaire study was conducted. 21 software engineering faculty and experts in teaching software engineering related courses participated in this study. The questionnaire contained demographic questions, questions related to students' engagement and to different methodologies adopted by respondents in the classroom. Results showed that the majority of respondents found engaging students in software engineering courses to be the biggest challenge they faced in the classroom. Almost half of the participants found difficulties designing practical activities for students. Results also revealed that the problem-based learning approach is the most used in software engineering lectures, followed by gamification techniques and role-playing which are new trends used to engage students. Moreover, the majority of the participants considered that the adoption of new teaching methodologies in the classroom produced high impact in the students' learning experience. Based on the outcomes of this questionnaire study, a conceptual model to engage students in software engineering courses is proposed. For future work, complementary studies should be implemented to evaluate the proposed model in a real-world scenarios including its effect on the achievement of learning outcomes.