Reimagining the Modern Physical Software Engineering Education and Training Environment

As cloud computing becomes the dominant global IT infrastructure paradigm, this presents additional opportunities to enhance the way software engineering is taught. Dr. Peter Holowka has spent nearly twenty years as a Chief Information Officer in the education industry in Canada. One of his key responsibilities has been to support teaching and learning through technology from a leadership position. Software engineering education has additional, specialized facility requirements within an educational institution. This work will depict some of the latest design considerations and approaches used in Western Canada to support learning while simultaneously controlling costs. This will be of benefit to faculty/administration involved in the design or renovation of their institution's instructional spaces. The main contribution of this work is to illustrate how the physical teaching space can be aligned with a pedagogy that permits the teaching of advanced software engineering (artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc.), anywhere and at any time. How can redundancies be avoided and limited funds applied for the greatest benefit of students? This topic also has ethical, social, and cultural components, particularly concerning the digital divide that keeps software engineering education beyond the grasp of many marginalized groups.