Applying E-Book System to Facilitate Student’ Flipped Learning Performance in Software Engineering Courses

Abstract

In recent years, many institutions have pointed out that software developments are important to nations, societies, and individuals. However, to develop quality software, students should not only possess programming skills, but also have to apply the knowledge and skills of software engineering. This entails the importance of software engineering education. Currently, most software engineering courses were conducted using the traditional teaching strategy. Most students can only recite and understand the pertinent knowledge with concerning software engineering after learning. As mentioned above, this study adopts a learner-centered pedagogy, named flipped classroom, to improve software engineering education. Moreover, in order to promote students’ learning performance before the class in flipped classrooms, this study applies an e-book system, named BookRoll. By using the e-book system, students can learn at anytime and anywhere before the class. Simultaneously, their reading behaviors may be recorded by the system. Teachers can facilitate the student discussions and interactions with peers in the class by capturing and analyzing student reading status and further enhancing their learning performance. To explore students’ learning performance in software engineering courses, students from two classes were invited to learn with different learning approaches (flipped learning approach and flipped learning with e-book system approach). The experimental results showed that the students who learned with the proposed approach outperformed those students who learned with traditional flipped learning approach.