Project-Based Learning with Examples from Industry in University Courses: An Experience Report from an Undergraduate Requirements Engineering Course

A significant challenge within university education, especially with regard to the teaching of highly theoretical topics like requirements engineering, is to maintain students' interest and motivation whilst addressing the core concepts that will enable students to work in industry upon graduation. It has long been established that experience-based learning can aid in both these feats: On the one hand, providing students with industrial case examples rather than "dry" academic assignments can increase student interest and motivation. On the other hand, a case example-centric classroom approach can yield a rich learning environment which fosters collaboration, communication, and self-directed exploration of the instructed principles. In previous work, we have reported on our experience in changing a graduate requirements engineering course towards using case examples based on real industry projects. As more and more curricula change in advance of project-based teaching paradigms, this paper discusses results from the long-term application of such a course design in a graduate setting. In addition, this paper reports our findings from the replication in an undergraduate requirements engineering course indicating that project-based learning techniques foster different teaching goals in graduate and undergraduate settings.