Software Engineering and Learning Technologies: Establishing Supporting Mechanisms for Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Over the last few years, the educational process has been undergoing a significant transformation, incorporating technologies that provide broad access to a variety of learning applications, as well as fostering greater interaction, collaboration and communication between learners and teachers. Despite the benefits, the establishment and adoption of educational technologies is a complex activity from a technical point of view. Among the problems encountered, there is a great demand for quality requirements, especially in learning applications that have several users with different needs, requirements changing constantly, separation of interests, sharing of resources, use of different access devices, among other aspects. In a different but related perspective, Software Engineering is characterized by the establishment of processes, methods, techniques and tools for the production of quality applications. In this sense, this project has as main objective to promote Research, Development and Innovation in two areas of interest: Software Engineering and Educational Technologies. The integration of the areas occurs as the processes, methods, techniques and tools of Software Engineering, associated to Educational Technologies, are investigated and used in the design and development of learning applications. On the other hand, the Software Engineering domain itself must be exploited in the validation of the learning applications developed, particularly in the teaching of the Software Testing and Project Management subareas. We highlight that the project has a multi and interdisciplinary character and, from its execution, we intend to contribute in an effective way to the establishment and adoption of innovative practices and mechanisms for the eductional process. (AU)