Students perception on the impact of their involvement in the learning process: an empirical study

Nowadays, when the changes that appear in programming paradigms and in software process development methodologies are extremely frequent, teaching a Software Engineering related course has become a demanding task. To all these are added changes caused by the dynamics of the society and the traits of the current learners and how they learn. To cope with the challenges mentioned above, the paper proposes a complementary method for Project Based Learning in teaching two Software Engineering related courses, at undergraduate and master level at Babeş-Bolyai University. Its contribution is twofold: firstly, it frames a new pedagogical approach based on “Students Generating Questions” as a learning strategy, defined in a collaborative way. The approach is supported by an e-learning platform designed as smart learning environment. Secondly, it investigates through a quantitative and qualitative analysis, the students perceptions, their feedback and learning experiences on the use of applying this learning method. The results of the survey indicate that the proposed learning method helped students to better regulate their learning and to achieve their goals. It also revealed some advantages reported by the students such as reduction of test anxiety, productive collaborative learning and the creation of a question bank which represents a consistent and comprehensive material for training during the semester and for their exam preparation.