Toward Enhancing the Training of Software Engineering Students and Professionals Using Active Video Watching

Soft skills (e.g., the ability to communicate, negotiate, collaborate) are essential for software engineers. However, teaching soft skills in a conventional classroom setting is time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this paper, we present and motivate the idea of adopting active video watching (AVW) for soft skills training in software engineering education. Also, we discuss how AVW can contribute to formal learning (e.g., at universities), but also to professional development (e.g., in software development organizations). Furthermore, we present AVW-Space, a web-based AVW platform. Finally, we report our experience from using AVW in a software engineering project course to teach university students presentation skills as one example of soft skills essential for practicing software engineers.