Workshop


4th Workshop on Emerging Software Engineering Education (WESEE 2021)



Software Engineering Education during COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond


Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic and related social impacts are redefining the way education is delivered at all levels from primary schools to higher education. It has significantly altered the ecosystem of the education providers around the globe and created a vagueness regarding the repercussions on teaching and learning. Additionally, it has forced millions of students to stay away from the classroom and instead access education from home. The technologydriven measures such as online learning and teaching paved the path that might work for imparting the subject knowledge to the students.

We quite evidently now realize that such disaster situations such as pandemics have the potential to transform the entire education system of the world. The educational reforms in the COVID’19 era seem to be a live example of how “need” truly drives innovation or reinvention. In this era, transforming offline programme delivery to the online format has itself been a hugely challenging task; even more so for the programmes and related courses that involve the hardware. The latter is not a big problem in the area of software engineering education but still, there are ample challenges to overcome in order to achieve an efficient and effective online programme delivery. Teaching Software Engineering and allied courses requires a lot of interactions, projects, teamwork, and activities to comprehend the concepts taught by the instructor. Conducting teaching around these programme components demands novel and innovative online teaching methods, practices and tools. Further, such futuristic teaching pedagogies should apply to both academic and industrial training contexts.

The 4th edition of WESEE aims to invoke discussions on teaching and learning various software engineering courses in this COVID’19 pandemic situation. Specifically, the focus of WESEE 2021 will be around the following questions:

  1. How to effectively teach SE and allied courses?
  2. What are students’ perceptions of online SE education?
  3. Does moving offline to online affect the learning outcomes and their delivery?
  4. How are the higher education institutions/industries teaching SE using online channels?
  5. What innovative teaching pedagogies have SE instructors employed to teach SE?
  6. Are there adequate and equitable resources to teach SE online?
  7. How has COVID-19 situation affected the underprivileged students’ SE education?