Learner-centered software engineering education: from resources to skills and pedagogical patterns

A revolution is taking place in academic and continuing education, one that deals with the philosophy of how we teach and learn, the relationship between educators and learners, the way in which the classroom is structured, and the nature of the curriculum. This new approach, termed learner-centered education, is focused on the needs, skills and interests of the learner rather than on the organization of curriculum content. This paper describes an approach for identifying critical skills and for designing training material for learner-centered software engineering education. The approach starts from an analysis of the software developer´s context of work, identifies critical skills and then associates relevant learning resources with them. The approach has been successfully used and validated in a real world-training program called PRISE that the first author developed-Programme de Reorientation des Ingenieurs Sans Emploi, a Curriculum for Retraining Unemployed Engineers in Software Engineering. The approach is also being used in some courses in the Concordia bachelor of software engineering program