A Software Engineering Perspective for Accelerating Educational Technologies

How can Software Engineering support Technology for Education (T4E) community to enable even non- technical users to rapidly develop quality instructional software (Technology for X) with minimal effort? The main thrust of this tutorial is to unveil and uncover the potential of Software Engineering to address the above concerns from multiple dimensions. We briefly discuss the state-of-art in educational technologies (ET) from a software engineering (SE) perspective and formulate significant research challenges for both the communities. We emphasize that developing and maintaining educational technologies is not just content and infrastructure management but has tremendous scope to apply the ideas of software engineering. SE is further required to address the scale and variety challenges that are inherent in T4E domain. We discuss the applicability of SE life cycles (iterative, agile) in the context of T4E domain. We then present a case study of applying software engineering ideas to accelerate the development and maintenance of a family of eLearning Systems. Finally, we briefly outline an integrated approach of Lean, Agile and Software Product Lines (SPL) with potential research agenda for next 5-10 years and uncover this approach as a significant value add for the T4E community.