A model for evaluating the effectiveness of software engineering virtual labs

In modern society, software has been developed and applied to various fields such as in industry, academia as well as in everyday life. This brings a challenge of training a large number of software engineers in the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. As the real-world problems are changing rapidly, software engineers of the 21^st century face new challenges. In order to cope with the situation, the Software Engineering (SE) education has to be constantly reviewed and changes must be introduced. In our work, we have developed a virtual laboratory for SE course. The virtual labs can help in improving SE education and, in turn, in preparing SE students for professional careers. It is envisaged that the virtual lab will also help the SE educators in underprivileged educational institutions having lack of teaching resources, and who are willing to improve education at their institutions. One of the important issues that should be addressed is the evaluation of the effectiveness of learning SE by using virtual labs. We have proposed a conceptual model for evaluating effectiveness of SE virtual labs course.