Fully online implementation of introductory software engineering education including web application development practice

Abstract

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of educational institutes have been forced to execute online distributed education. In traditional courses conducting not only lectures but also practice, the instructor and teaching assistants walk around the class, check how the students are doing, find students who are having trouble, and guide them. However, in distributed education, it is difficult to do the same things as in a collocated environment; therefore, some measures are required. We have been conducting introductory software engineering education that applies web application development in addition to lectures. In the fully online implementation of this course, the following issues need to be considered: (1) the creation of a mechanism to mitigate problems regarding the building of a software engineering environment, and (2) the creation of a question and answer process during application development on a remote meeting system. This paper describes some solutions to the two issues.