Supporting Online Synchronous Education for Software Engineering via Web-based Operation Record and Replay

* Corresponding author Abstract—Influenced by web 2.0 and cloud computing, web applications such as online modeling tools and web-based IDE develop rapidly. They are important for Software Engineering education because practice is crucial for students to get better understanding of the concepts introduced in class. However, most of these web applications are designed for individual usage, lacking support for real-time interactions. To solve this problem, we develop and demonstrate an Online Synchronous Education Plugin (OSEP), which is based on web-based operation record and replay. On one side, OSEP supports basic synchronous and interactive education on existing noninteractive web applications by high-fidelity record on the lecturer’s terminal and self-adaptive replay on the observer’s terminals. On the other side, OSEP ensures reliable, orderly synchronization and interaction by replay smoothing and latecomer controlling. In case study, we illustrate how OSEP is used in the real-time interactive education of online UML and web-based IDE teaching, which verifies the feasibility of the online synchronous education method for Software Engineering via web-based operation record and replay.