A Green Learning Model for Teaching Requirements Engineering Course

Abstract

Nowadays, severe environmental issues are faced by our planet mainly because of increase in consumption of energy, and waste from industry. The “Green IT” concept has been introduced in our society in order to increase the age of our planet and improving health of its inhabitants by reducing carbon emission. In order to effectively adopt green IT principles, it is suggested that it should be taught to undergraduate students as a part of several course in order to train them to use green IT concepts in their professional life. Requirements Engineering (RE) process is perceived as one of the most critical activities within software development projects and need to be effectively taught in universities. The main purpose of this work is to introduce the concept of Green IT while teaching RE course. The enhanced learning model (referred as Green learning model) highlights activities to teach students the green IT concepts and makes RE more environmental friendly. In our existing learning model, green IT concepts have been incorporated at several places especially “RE teaching and learning material” section introduces three new concepts in addition to adding green IT concepts in existing concepts of the model that are agile software development, risk analysis in terms of energy and environmental sustainability as a non-functional requirement. The green learning model was then evaluated through expert reviews by RE experts and showed positive results. It is expected that the proposed green learning model can increase awareness and understanding of environmental sustainability of IT in software engineering education and will help the production of quality requirements engineers that possess all required RE skills.