The Role of Digital Cultural Heritage in Software Engineering Education: Using Assets from the Digital Repository of Ireland As a Teaching Aid

This paper presents the experience of a class of third level students in the South East Technological University, Waterford of using assets from digital cultural heritage research to aid software engineering in the classroom. Seven students are involved in this research study. The assets are from research being carried out by the lecturer, a PhD student, in the digital cultural heritage area. The value of the assets used to illustrate metadata standards and how these standards are used, is evaluated by means of an analysis of ‘Reflective Sheets’ completed by the students as co-researchers. A single Participation Action Research (PAR) spiral is implemented. NVIVO is then used by the lecturer to enable the generation of ‘codes’ and ‘themes’ from the contents of the students reflective sheets. An analysis of these ‘codes’ and ‘themes’ is then performed.