A blended approach to course design and pedagogy to impart soft skills: An IT company's experiences from software engineering course

Abstract

Software engineering course plays an important role for overall development of new hires in corporate training. During last few years, both academia and industry turned their attention towards integrating soft-skills in learning, while efforts are being made to bridge the knowledge, skill gap between industry requirements and what academic institutes churn out. Learners appreciate the concepts when they experience the relevance of software engineering techniques to their day-to-day job work. Hence a scenario based learning approach is needed by integrating best practices with curriculum design, industry processes (hard factors); business communication and leadership skills (soft factors). In this work we address the top ten sought-after qualities from an entry level employee by imparting necessary knowledge and skills along with the soft factors. The most vital areas among the ones listed in Software Engineering Book Of Knowledge (SWEBOK) are taken for the course design and an outcome oriented pedagogy is proposed to enhance learning effectiveness. The pedagogical activities like learning by doing, learning from mistakes, team work, collaborative learning are suitably incorporated during execution of the course. The results based on the proposed model of execution are very promising towards enabling the entry level talent to be business ready.