Objectives: Code style is an important aspect of text-based programming because programs written with good style are considered easier to understand and change and so improve the maintainability of the delivered software product. However teaching code style is complicated by the existence of many style guides and standards that contain…

Teachers deal with plagiarism on a regular basis, so they try to prevent and detect plagiarism, a task that is complicated by the large size of some classes. Students who cheat often try to hide their plagiarism (obfuscate), and many different similarity detection engines (often called plagiarism detection tools) have been built to help teachers.…

Many practitioners might struggle with becoming productive in different software engineering (SE) roles due to misalignment of the skills learnt during the university time with what is expected in the industry. Companies spend significant resources to train the personnel, whose academic backgrounds are not only based on "computing…

Objectives: Communication skills are crucial for effective software development teams, but those skills are difficult to teach. The goal of our project is to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching face-to-face communication skills using AVW-Space, a platform for video-based learning that provides personalized nudges to support student's engagement…

Assessing team software development projects is notoriously difficult and typically based on subjective metrics. To help make assessments more rigorous, we conducted an empirical study to explore relationships between subjective metrics based on peer and instructor assessments, and objective metrics based on GitHub and chat data. We studied 23…

As the importance of non-technical skills in the software engineering industry increases, the skill sets of graduates match less and less with industry expectations. A growing body of research exists that attempts to identify this skill gap. However, only few so far explicitly compare opinions of the industry with what is currently being taught in…

There continues to be an increase in enrollments in various computing programs at academic institutions due to many job opportunities available in the information, communication, and technology sectors. This enrollment surge has presented several challenges in many Computer Science (CS), Information Technology (IT), and Software Engineering (SE)…

Objectives: Faculty new to teaching operating systems or those looking to refresh their course need to understand the state of the art in operating system education. Toward this goal, we conducted a survey of operating system instructors to understand how they approach teaching the course and what textbook and software platforms they use in their…

Nearly all software built today impinges upon end-user privacy and needs to comply with relevant regulations. Therefore, there have been increasing calls for integrating considerations of compliance with privacy regulations throughout the software engineering lifecycle. However, software engineers are typically trained in the technical fields and…

Software modeling is an integral practice for software engineers, especially as the complexity of software solutions increases. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the industry standard for software modeling. however, it is often used incorrectly and misunderstood by novice software designers. This study is centered around understanding patterns of…

Cheating has been a long-standing issue in university assessments. However, the release of ChatGPT and other free-to-use generative AI tools has provided a new and distinct method for cheating. Students can run many assessment questions through the tool and generate a superficially compelling answer, which may or may not be accurate. We ran a…

Programming skills are increasingly important to the current digital economy, yet these skills have long been regarded as challenging to acquire. A central challenge in learning programming skills involves the simultaneous use of multiple component skills. This article investigates why students struggle with integrating component skills--a…

Context: Knowledge level and productivity of the software engineering (SE) workforce are the subject of regular discussions among practitioners, educators, and researchers. There have been many efforts to measure and improve the knowledge gap between SE education and industrial needs. Objective: Although the existing efforts for aligning SE…

This study focuses on the challenges encountered in online cybersecurity education. It adopts an exploratory research design using a mixed-methods approach to investigate the perceptions and experiences of postgraduate students enrolled in an online cybersecurity program. The collection of data is structured into two distinct phases. In the…

Service learning, a high-impact pedagogy, involves integrating academic outcomes with service to the community. The success of service learning experiences depends on the development of mutually reciprocal relationships between students, instructors, and community partners, ensuring equitable benefits for all stakeholders. To explore how…