SOFTWARE ENGINEERING TEACHING THROUGH COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE & INTERNET TOOLS

The accelerated growth of the Internet and Software industry has given rise to emerging businesses. Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook are the best examples of businesses where collective intelligence is in action. The production and management of ideas has become the core of creativity and problem solving. However, educational environments have been quite slow in integrating emerging paradigms and have many limitations in their contribution to the development of key skills related to collective intelligence (CI).

This paper describes a methodological framework that is informed by teamwork methodology, focusing on the elements of collective intelligence and Problem-Based Learning (PBL). In addition, as a complementary support, a computational internet tool has been employed to establish a participative software engineering course.

The study took an exploratory research approach. A process of incrementally refining ideas allowed students and experts to improve the collaborative learning outcomes of students at every stage. The experimental results identified a set of indicators that can be used to evaluate the collaborative performance of students. Moreover, the tool that was employed facilitated open management of ideas in real time collective assessment of completed work, and it also increased the students’ motivation and engagement in the learning process.

The authors conclude that the proposed approach is a useful tool to facilitate the investigation of students’ learning processes in collaborative learning environments through the use of internet tools and the collective intelligence elements in software engineering courses