Exploiting Crowd-based Learning Method in Software Engineering Course

Software engineering is one of main major course for computer science. The main objective of this course is to improve the engineering capabilities of students to develop complex software systems. However, current course practice methods are teacher-centered and thus highly depend on the limited talents, experiences and efforts of teachers. Such methods greatly restrict students’ scopes to gain necessary skills and artifacts, and to draw on successful experiences to address various personalized engineering issues and therefore enhance abilities to tackle engineering complexity. This paper presents a crowd-based learning method and introduces our exploration to use the method to reform the software engineering course practice. The essence of our exploration is to exploit the wisdoms and artifacts of crowds over Internet to support students to accomplish their course projects. The former is the engineering knowledges shared in question and answering (Q&A) platforms such as StackOverflow, and the latter is the open source software (OSS) hosted in OSS sites such as GitHub. We use the method in two separate course practices that aim to improve students’ abilities to develop original, high-quality and large-scale software systems. The results of three-year explorations are positive and impressive and show that the crowd-based learning method is effective.