Towards contextualised software engineering education: an African perspective

The discipline of Software Engineering is continuously adapting to new challenges while gaining more and more insights. The age of globalisation has brought about a new movement of internationalisation and localisation. While practitioners fully embrace the efforts, educators only marginally consider the implications for the teaching and learning of Software Engineering. While the relevance of the software deployment context has been widely recognised, the intrinsic values of the development context are less evident. Besides western cultural indicators being omnipresent in software applications, they are deeply rooted in Software Engineering concepts and methods. Standards and models have been established in the absence of possible deviations from other -- e.g. African -- contexts. Educators and authors of common and internationally used textbooks present Software Engineering concepts and methods as universally valid. Thus software engineering graduates all over the world continue to be ill-equipped for specific software development contexts. Moreover the necessity to localise Software Engineering education is illustrated by our vast amount of challenges, experiences and best-practices of teaching Software Engineering in a Sub-Saharan country. In this paper, we introduce a generic framework leading towards a Contextualised Software Engineering education (CSE2).

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