Smart education in an interconnected world: Virtual, collaborative, project-based courses to teach global software engineering

Abstract

In addition to technical skills, software engineers in the twenty-first century need to learn distributed project management and intercultural skills to collaborate effectively in international teams. Innovative, inquiry-based teaching methods combined with smart technologies can provide an effective method to teach students these skills, without leaving their home universities. A series of cooperative, distributed virtual courses conducted by universities in Japan, Germany, and Sri Lanka are presented. The implementation of smart e-learning courses which make use of context- and project-based learning, collaborative learning and teaching with video conferencing, e-learning systems and cloud-based platforms are described. As sociotechnical systems, these courses are evaluated according smart education principles, such as adaptation, sensing, inference, anticipation, self-learning, and self-organization.