Teaching Requirements Engineering to the Baháí Students in Iran who are Denied of Higher Education

The increasing interest in Requirements Engineering (RE) in recent years has motivated many academics to provide students with a broad knowledge of the fundamental principles of RE. In RE Education and Training (REET), it is imperative to cover a wide range of topics and teach a variety of skills. Major challenges of REET have already been well recognised and documented in the literature. Moreover, wide spread use of web-based education has caused an explosion of published literature related to distance education. When students are not collocated with the instructor and they themselves are geographically dispersed clearly exacerbates some of the well-known challenges of REET. In this paper I share the experiences gained in teaching an online postgraduate RE subject for the first time to students located in Iran. These students have been denied of basic human rights, specifically access to University education. I used role playing as a pedagogical tool to give students a greater appreciation of issues and problems associated with RE in quasi-real settings. This paper describes some of the challenges encountered and the lessons learnt with some suggestions on how to address, among other issues, the problem of distance between students and the instructor.