Challenges in teaching software engineering professionals online

This panel fosters the understanding of online graduate software engineering education for working professionals. The panelists address advantages and disadvantages of this increasingly common form of course delivery. The discussion draw on the panelists' experience delivering a variety of software engineering courses online at four different institutions. The panel emphasize issues that are common in dealing with the adult working professionals who populate many software engineering graduate programs, and issues that tend to arise due to the nature of software engineering curricular content. The panel focuses on courses in which all or almost all of the course activities take place online. That is, these are not face-to-face courses that have been Web enhanced. Rather, they are courses that can be taken by students who are not able to come to campus. In addition, the style of course emphasizes interaction among participants, rather than independent study.