On the evaluation of an open software engineering course

Open online courses are a method of online lecturing whose application in education is not bounded by space and location constraints. The successful implementation of open courses requires conceptual changes in how instructors and students behave in open unbounded education environment. There are some emerging open courses for teaching specific topics of Software Engineering. However, it is still limited the knowledge about the best practices for learning Software Engineering processes, methods, and tools in such an open environment. To address this limitation, this paper presents and evaluates an open course for Introduction to Software Engineering. The presented open course has over 250 online students registered and is based on a face-to-face equivalent. The online course is currently composed of 44 video lectures, 160 questions in 16 quizzes, and several discussion topics. We evaluate this course by comparing the students´ performance in online vs. face-to-face equivalent courses. Our results indicated that students who had access to online content achieve similar or better performance than students taking only the face-to-face course.