Involving External Stakeholders in Project Courses

Problem: The involvement of external stakeholders in capstone projects and project courses is desirable due to its potential positive effects on the students. Capstone projects particularly profit from the inclusion of an industrial partner to make the project relevant and help students acquire professional skills. In addition, an increasing push towards education that is aligned with industry and incorporates industrial partners can be observed. However, the involvement of external stakeholders in teaching moments can create friction and could, in the worst case, lead to frustration of all involved parties. Contribution: We developed a model that allows analysing the involvement of external stakeholders in university courses both in a retrospective fashion, to gain insights from past course instances, and in a constructive fashion, to plan the involvement of external stakeholders. Key Concepts: The conceptual model and the accompanying guideline guide the teachers in their analysis of stakeholder involvement. The model is comprised of several activities (define, execute, and evaluate the collaboration). The guideline provides questions that the teachers should answer for each of these activities. In the constructive use, the model allows teachers to define an action plan based on an analysis of potential stakeholders and the pedagogical objectives. In the retrospective use, the model allows teachers to identify issues that appeared during the project and their underlying causes. Drawing from ideas of the reflective practitioner, the model contains an emphasis on reflection and interpretation of the observations made by the teacher and other groups involved in the courses. Key Lessons: Applying the model retrospectively to a total of eight courses shows that it is possible to reveal hitherto implicit risks and assumptions and to gain a better insight into the interaction...Comment: Abstract shortened since arxiv.org limits length of abstracts. See paper/pdf for full abstract. Paper is forthcoming, accepted August 2017. Arxiv version 2 corrects misspelled author nam

Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university undergraduate software development course teaching agile development methodologies. Surveys revealed positive attitudes towards the course and the change of employed development methodology from Scrum to Kanban. However, surveys were not usable to ascertain the degree to which students had adapted their workflows and whether they had done so in accordance with course goals. Therefore, we analyzed students' software repository data, which represents information that can be collected by educators to reveal insights into learning successes and detailed student behavior. We analyze the software repositories created during the last five courses, and evaluate differences in workflows between Kanban and Scrum usage

Benchmark Portfolio for SOFT 261: Software Engineering IV

This benchmark portfolio documents the course objectives, teaching strategies, and assessments for the inaugural offering of SOFT 261: Software Engineering IV at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). This is the final course in the core sequence of software engineering courses taken by students in the new undergraduate program in software engineering at UNL. These courses teach fundamental computer science concepts in the broader context of engineering software. As an ACE (Achievement-Centered Education) 2 course, the instructional material in SOFT 261 is focused on teaching visual communications skills in the context of applying software engineering processes to a real-world software project. This portfolio describes the course objectives and how this course fits into the broader context of software engineering education at UNL. It also describes the instructional strategies used to teach visual communications embedded in a software engineering course and the assessments used to evaluate student learning. This portfolio also analyzes student learning to assess the effectiveness of the teaching strategies and course materials. Finally, this portfolio reflects on the intellectual challenges of designing and teaching a visual communications course specifically for software engineering majors that incorporates team-based, hands-on learning working with and communicating with software developers on a large open-source project

Peer Assessment in Experiential Learning : Assessing Tacit and Explicit Skills in Agile Software Engineering Capstone Projects

To prepare students for real-life software engineering projects, many higher-education institutions offer courses that simulate working life to varying degrees. As software engineering requires not only technical, but also inter- and intrapersonal skills, these skills should also be assessed. Assessing soft skills is challenging, especially when project-based and experiential learning are the primary pedagogical approaches. Previous work suggests that including students in the assessment process can yield a more complete picture of student performance. This paper presents experiences with developing and using a peer assessment framework that provides a 360-degree view on students' project performance. Our framework has been explicitly constructed to accommodate and evaluate tacit skills that are relevant in agile software development. The framework has been evaluated with 18 bachelors- and 11 masters-level capstone projects, totaling 176 students working in self-organized teams. We found that the framework eases teacher workload and allows a more thorough assessment of students' skills. We suggest including self- and peer assessment into software capstone projects alongside other, more traditional schemes like productivity metrics, and discuss challenges and opportunities in defining learning goals for tacit and social skills.Peer reviewe

Agile in Teaching and Learning: Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

Agile software development methods are widespread in industry, and there is a wealth of academic research and practitioner publications currently available from this perspective. With the rise of Agile within companies worldwide, it is increasingly important for information systems education to keep up with this trend to ensure curriculum and courses are up-to-date. Students in the computing disciplines must be prepared to enter a job market where Agile is commonplace. As such, the topic of Agile in teaching and learning is critically important. The current special issue includes a rich collection of articles providing information systems educators with research-based, practical approaches for both teaching Agile (“the what”) and using Agile as a pedagogical approach (“the how”). In an effort to assist information systems educators categorize the growing amount of literature related to Agile in teaching and learning, a conceptual framework is provided which places the literature along the two axes of pedagogy (“the how”) and the content (“the what”) ranging from other, non-Agile to Agile. Finally, the authors present a call for future research integrating Agile on a meta-level in the course development process. We hope that this special issue inspires educators and researchers to consider integrating Agile into their teaching and learning

Agile Learning: Students’ Perceptions of Collaboration

Educators are encouraged to incorporate collaborative learning into their classrooms in order to promote active learning through teamwork. However, students often regard collaboration as lacking coordination and accountability among the team members, thus resulting in fewer opportunities for academic success. Nested within project-based learning, agile learning provides the framework for effective team and workflow regulation which is based on a collaborative, incremental and iterative learning process. With the help of the quasi-experimental method, both quantitative and qualitative data was collected through a series of anonymous surveys. Aimed to investigate whether the incorporation of agile learning has an effect on students’ perception of collaboration opportunities and their academic performance in college-level English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes, the results of the study indicated that the learners did not perceive a correlation between agile learning and the aforementioned notions. The findings are discussed in relation to the learners’ preferences for learning in foreign language classrooms and their own definition of collaboration which is ultimately reduced to the individual work process

An Alliance-Based Term Project in Software Quality Courses: a Lesson Learned

Software testing education has become important in the field of software engineering education. In the previous software quality assurance course, students were asked to form teams to complete a term project. By working on term projects, students can learn programming skills and test skills in a practical way. However, from the experience of the last 3 years, we found that students only did unit testing and system performance testing well but did poorly in integration testing. In addition, students do not yet have the concept of system decomposition and integration, even though it is important during software development. In this paper we report our improvements to software testing course design - an alliance-based approach. In the term project, students are organized into teams and many teams are grouped into alliances. Each alliance has a team of masters building game platforms for others. The master team must define the application interface to interact with other gaming teams, and they must perform integration tests based on the defined interface. In this paper we report our experiences and student feedback on the educational approach

Experiential Learning in the Technology Disciplines February 2020

Learning-by-doing has long been a tradition in the technology disciplines. It is the hands-on work, combined with student reflection, feedback and assessment, that reinforces theory into practice. Over the past 40 years, experiential learning (EL) in higher education has grown beyond in-class assignments to include internships, cooperative education, team-based learning, project-based learning, community engagement, service learning, international and study-away experiences, capstone projects and research opportunities. This paper provides an overview of experiential education theory and practice in the undergraduate technology disciplines, and presents examples of how experiential learning practices have evolved over time at a medium-sized institution in the Northeast USA. In addition, this paper offers instructors theoretical strategies to improve the hands-on work that is likely already present in their courses