What makes it hard to teach software engineering to end users? some directions from adaptive and personalized learning

Today, software is being co-designed, co-developed, co-maintained and customized by professionals from a wide range of other disciplines and end users from varied and different backgrounds in addition to software engineers. While there is extensive research on facilitating and supporting end users to write better software, there is sparse research on better ways of educating them with software engineering (SE) knowledge. On the other hand, learning domain has recognized the need for adaptive and personalized learning (APL) and developed numerous approaches, methods and tools to address that need. The main purpose of this paper is firstly to expose some challenges of teaching SE to end users with an aim of understanding learning needs of end users. We then present a brief overview of APL domain and an ontology based framework for integrating APL with software engineering education (SEE). We then discuss a brief example of end users from adult literacy followed by some future directions towards delivering personalized SEE.