Cooperative project-based learning in a web-based software engineering course

Even in self-organized project-based learning, the instructors' role re-mains critical, especially in the initial orientation provided to the students in order to grasp the educational goals and the various roles they may undertake to achieve them. In this paper we survey a few questions proposed to that purpose in a web-based software engineering course, together with relevant answers, we outline the project set-up methodology aimed at providing students with that initial orientation in the laboratory part of the course, we collect a few empirical data out of the latest seven-year history of the course and, finally, we put the presented work in the context of current approaches to software engineering education and draw brief conclusions.