Tailored Software Design for Remote Communication Skill Development in Software Engineering Curriculums

Communication skill is one of the most crucial skills that Software Engineering (SE) industry demands. According to literature, it is evident that oral communication, feedback, and presentation skills are the most crucial among all. SE curriculums need to be structured to prepare its undergraduates to meet these demands. Due to Covid-19 pandemic, most universities opted for online education. Therefore, communication skill development inevitably needed to be conducted remotely. Current mechanisms used in these remote sessions do not cater to unique needs of SE industry. This paper proposes a design of a plugin to be used with Zoom to analyze and improve student's communication skills real time. The proposed design is inclusive of two phases. In phase one, variables which determine communication skills are identified. In relation to these variables, student communication data will be collected for a period of a semester. The data collection will occur via Zoom sessions, for a selected project-based learning (PBL) module. In phase two, a machine learning model will be created using the gathered data in phase 1, and the plugin will be implemented. The plugin will categorize the students' communication skills into 3 categories such as “weak”, “average” and “good”. The proposed plugin generates a comprehensive report on student's communication skills which could be downloaded at the end of each session. The expected accuracy rate of the plugin is 80%.