Challenges for software engineering in educational technologies

Abstract

This paper is an attempt at a vision, driven by experiences in India, of a set of research and technical challenges for software engineering researchers that stem from critical concerns of scale and variety when designing educational technologies. Educational concerns are the same everywhere. To be holistic, we have to consider points of view of all concerned stake holder groups of educational systems: they are grouped as: {students, teachers, employers, society}, {administrators}, and {managers}. The first group is concerned with the technical content to be transacted through education and its quality and value to them. It is concerned with integrity with the body of knowledge of the subject, constrained by the level at which the subject is to be taught or learnt, further constrained by the time available for a course on that subject - this is a source of variety, as do the different languages of instruction that may be used, whilst the subjects themselves and the level at which they are dealt with present a concern for scale. Further sources of variety are: the student as a novice, a beginner, an advanced student, or one revising the subject matter for the purposes of a test or an examination - the kind of student presents a source of variety, and the number of students presents a matter of scale; the teacher as an expositor, a tutor, a coach, or a mentor - the kind of teachers presents variety, whereas the number of teachers needed in the system are a matter of scale; as an employer, as the next level of an educational system, or the society as the beneficiary of education, and the student is both a product of the Educational System, as well as a consumer, the immediate beneficiary. There is lastly, the quality of the Educational System as a whole, as seen from each stakeholders point of view. This is all about technical content to be transacted in the process of educational services. In addition, we will need to look for support to administrative and managerial aspects of educational systems