Challenges in E-learning: from Requirements Engineering Perspective

Nowadays, education offers great flexibility to learners in order to help them to succeed. E-learning as knowledge management tool gives service to learners in disseminating and sharing information. Therefore, there is a lot of interaction from users in E-learning community that helps them to solve tasks in E-learning application. There are challenges to sustain E-learning service because users might get bored and infrequently use it. Requirements Engineering (RE) takes the opportunity to strengthen RE process by investigating how socio-technical requirements such as lack of social presence, feeling bored and lack of motivation can be transformed as socio-technical requirements and are available to be implemented by developers as agreed by users. Therefore, RE process should manage to capture socio-technical requirements in order to allow consistent motivation among learners. Requirements elicitation, as the initial stage in RE process, may improve its mechanism in eliciting socio-technical requirements for collaborative application such as E-learning. Hence, RE process and Elearning components must be carefully studied to ensure RE as in Software Engineering field can assist collaborative application to improve elicitation process and come out with a set of requirements before E-learning is implemented. This paper describes challenges in social interaction issue for E-learning environment and how RE sees these challenges.