Innovative Active Blended Learning Pedagogy in Software Requirements Engineering Education

Requirements Engineering (RE) represents a fundamental activity in the software development process. When executed correctly, RE can have a beneficial impact on the final software quality. Given the increasing demand for competent professionals in the software industry, adopting pedagogical strategies that effectively align theory and practice in teaching Requirements Engineering is imperative. This ensures the training of qualified professionals capable of successfully executing software projects. This paper reports our experience designing and enhancing an innovative proposal pedagogy to teach RE through active blended learning. We grounded our proposal on the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) methodology, which enables external community stakeholders to present real-world problems within the classroom environment. Students take on the role of requirements engineers and participate in various RE activities as they design their software solutions. Our pedagogical proposal combines PBL with other methodologies, e.g., Flipped Classroom, Diaries, and Gamification. We also provide evidence from a case study conducted in our course, in which we assess students’ perceptions of our approach. The results indicate increased student engagement, motivation, and performance, as well as improved understanding of RE concepts and their application to real-world problems. Additionally, we improved the active blended learning proposal based on our lessons learned and students’ perceptions. This work concludes that an active blended learning approach can significantly enhance RE education, offering a practical and adaptable strategy to foster both technical and soft skills among software engineering students. The main contributions of this study are (i) the design of a structured and replicable pedagogical framework for teaching RE using blended learning, (ii) the empirical evaluation of this framework through its implementation in two undergraduate cohorts, and (iii) the refinement of the framework based on lessons learned and student feedback.