Combining Innovative Technology and Context based Approaches in Teaching Software Engineering

Abstract

Sustainability in learning is very essential for a sustainable future which largely depends on education. Sustainable learning requires learners to increase and rebuild base-knowledge as the circumstances change and get more complex. This becomes very obvious particularly for in- formation technology (IT) discipline where technology is rapidly changing and practice getting more complicated. Sustainability enables students to use their learning from formal education into practice, provide hands on experience (HOE) and help them rebuild their knowledge base in complex situations. This is also essential to achieve a high graduate outcome rate (GOR) which helps the education sector to become sustainable. In the existing policies and frameworks, institutions are moving towards more off-campus learning and less face-to-face learning. As a result, a downward trend is experienced in students’ engagement across IT discipline. This affects students’ ability in achieving HOE and appears to be one of the reasons of low GOR which poses a threat to the sustainability in the education sector for both stakeholder and learners’ perspectives. This paper presents a combined approach of context-based teaching with incorporation of innovative technology to engage students and achieve a better HOE towards sustainability in learning. The proposed approach was adopted in a software engineering course taught at School of IT at Deakin University, Australia. Students were provided context-based teaching material and industry standard software engineering tools for practice to achieve HOE. Students evaluation and assessment results reports that proposed approach was significantly impacted positively to engage the students in classes towards improved sustainable learning.