Learning Performances towards the BookRoll E-Book System for Flipped Classrooms in Software Engineering Education

Abstract

The aim of software engineering education is to educate students in software technologies, developments, procedures, and scientific practices to enable them to cope with industrial demands. However, the implementation of software engineering education in traditional university classrooms is restricted by the semester structure, making it difficult to achieve a proper learning balance between theory and practice. To balance theoretical and practical learning, prior studies have indicated that flipped learning is a suitable classroom setting for students and teachers. In a flipped learning environment, it is important to enhance and capture students’ learning performance before the class to facilitate teachers and students in proceeding with in-class instruction and learning. In this study, an e-book system named BookRoll was applied to support software engineering education in a flipped learning setting. The proposed approach supports and facilitates out-of-class and in-class learning by providing reading and learning analytic functions for teachers and students. To evaluate the proposed approach, two classes of students were allocated to an experimental group and a control group to participate in an experiment. In the flipped learning process, the experimental group was supported by the BookRoll system, while the control group did not use the BookRoll system. The results revealed that the proposed approach not only promoted students’ learning achievements in software engineering education but also improved their learning motivation, attitude, and problem-solving ability. The reading behavior analysis further indicated that reading time was a statistically significant predictor of learning achievement.

Keywords

• flipped classroom
• software engineering education
• e-book system
• reading behaviors
• quality education