An Experience Report on Using Video-Creation Tasks in Requirements-Engineering Education

Requirements engineering is a key skill in systems and software engineering. Educating students in the different forms and concepts of requirements engineering (e.g., traditional versus agile) is essential to prepare them for any technical job. However, requirements-engineering education can be challenging, particularly if it is not structured around a real-world project, and thus taught only conceptually. Unfortunately, when designing lectures, educators face pedagogical, technological, and content-related challenges, such as practice-orientation, student motivation, prior knowledge of students, or even emergency situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we report our experiences of integrating a novel pedagogical idea into a typical requirements-engineering course that builds on the increased use of multimedia communication in all parts of society: we asked students to create videos to document and communicate requirements of diverse products. Overall, we report (i) the general design of the course; (ii) why, how, and in what form we introduced video-creation tasks; as well as (iii) the students' feedback and our experiences. Due to mostly positive feedback and the rising demand for multimedia competences in industry, we perceive the introduction of the video-creation tasks as a success for developing key skills and improving students' motivation to learn about requirements engineering. We provide an overview of our lessons learned and discuss their implications to enable other educators to integrate similar tasks in their courses, while avoiding the pitfalls we faced.