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

Evaluation of team dynamic in Norwegian projects for IT students

The need for teaching realistic software development in project courses has increased in a global scale. It has always been challenges in cooperating fast-changing software technologies, development methodologies and teamwork. Moreover, such project courses need to be designed in the connection to existing theoretical courses. We performed a large-scale research on student performance in Software Engineering projects in Norwegian universities. This paper investigates four aspects of team dynamics, which are team reflection, leadership, decision making and task assignment in order to improve student learning. Data was collected from student projects in 4 years at two universities. We found that some leader's characteristics are perceived differently for female and male leaders, including the perception of leaders as skilful workers or visionaries. Leadership is still a challenging aspect to teach, and assigned leadership is probably not the best way to learn. Students is are performing well in task review, however, needs support while performing task assignment. The result also suggests that task management to be done in more fine-grained levels. It is also important to maintain an open and active discussion to facilitate effective group decision makings

Reviews

Brian Clegg, Mining The Internet — Information Gathering and Research on the Net, Kogan Page: London, 1999. ISBN: 0–7494–3025–7. Paperback, 147 pages, £9.99

Plikasi Software Course Lab V.2.4 Untuk Implementasi Model Pembelajaran Interactive Problem Solving Pada Mata Kuliah Matematika

The purposes of this research are (1) to acquire the design of interactive learning media, (2) to analyze the obstacles and to find the solutions, (3) to analyze the implementation of interactive learning media model on mathematics course to improve students learning achievement. This research can be catagorized as action research with several stages: (1) problem design, (2) media design, (3) expert validation, (4) implementing interactive problem solving with CourseLab V.2.4, (5) monitoring and evaluation, (6) reflection and revision, (7) implementing the next cycle. This research was conducted in the department of civil engineering and planning Faculty of Engineering, Yogyakarta State University. The reseacrh participants were the students who joined Mathematics Data Analysis Course. Data anaysis technique were using quanitative and qualitative descriptive analysis. The findings showed that (1) the criteria for learning media design with CourseLab V.2.4 which is appropriate to implement learning model of interactive problem solving were as follow: (a) the level of difficulty was made in moderate level, (b) time allocation was implemented for the whole questions, not for every single question, (c) there was no need to show the answer key, (d) varying the type of test item, (e) there was no need to provide calculator application assistance; (2) there were some ways should be conducted to overcome the obstacles in implementing this interactive media, i.e. (a) start by publishing the software in the form of html, (b) adjusting the security setting of the browser apllication on low level, (c) using courselab program should be thoroughly because this program can save any changes automatically, (d) file should be compresed in the form of zip, rar, or the other before it was distributed to the students, (3) the implementation of CourseLab V.2.4 on learning media of interactive problem solving was effective to improve students' learning achievement

Mission 2 Solution: Requirements Engineering Education as a Central Theme in the BIT Programme

Design of integrated business-IT solutions is the main theme in the Business Information Technology programme (BIT) at the University of Twente. Our mission is to teach students to design solutions that are needed instead of solutions that are asked for. This makes requirements engineering an essential part of our education in business-IT alignment. Integration of requirements engineering (RE) in several courses is combined with challenging the students by authentic cases, taken from business practice, in which they have to apply theory and train their competences. This combination results in reflection as well as in RE experience and insight in the importance of requirements analysis. \ud In this position paper we outline how RE is integrated in the BIT programme and we discuss the project course BIT Ltd in more detail

DIDET: Digital libraries for distributed, innovative design education and teamwork. Final project report

The central goal of the DIDET Project was to enhance student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team based design engineering projects, in which they directly experience different cultural contexts and access a variety of digital information sources via a range of appropriate technology. To achieve this overall project goal, the project delivered on the following objectives: 1. Teach engineering information retrieval, manipulation, and archiving skills to students studying on engineering degree programs. 2. Measure the use of those skills in design projects in all years of an undergraduate degree program. 3. Measure the learning performance in engineering design courses affected by the provision of access to information that would have been otherwise difficult to access. 4. Measure student learning performance in different cultural contexts that influence the use of alternative sources of information and varying forms of Information and Communications Technology. 5. Develop and provide workshops for staff development. 6. Use the measurement results to annually redesign course content and the digital libraries technology. The overall DIDET Project approach was to develop, implement, use and evaluate a testbed to improve the teaching and learning of students partaking in global team based design projects. The use of digital libraries and virtual design studios was used to fundamentally change the way design engineering is taught at the collaborating institutions. This was done by implementing a digital library at the partner institutions to improve learning in the field of Design Engineering and by developing a Global Team Design Project run as part of assessed classes at Strathclyde, Stanford and Olin. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the class teaching model and the LauLima system developed at Strathclyde to support teaching and learning. Major findings include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical and cultural issues for successful elearning implementations. A need for strong leadership has been identified, particularly to exploit the benefits of cross-discipline team working. One major project output still being developed is a DIDET Project Framework for Distributed Innovative Design, Education and Teamwork to encapsulate all project findings and outputs. The project achieved its goal of embedding major change to the teaching of Design Engineering and Strathclyde's new Global Design class has been both successful and popular with students

Assessment of the use of preliminary concepts test and rubrics in practical learning at university

Comunicació presentada al ICERI 2019 12th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (Seville, Spain. 11-13 November, 2019).The high number of students and teachers in the laboratory practices of the course Theory of Machines and Mechanisms, shared by several engineering degrees at Universitat Jaume I, makes the teaching planning and evaluation challenging. Some issues were observed in past years, such as differences in the student knowledge of basic concepts, underpreparation before practical classes, poor quality of the written reports, absence of common objective assessment criteria among teachers and low success rate. That led us to the implementation of an action for educational improvement during the academic year 2018-2019. The aim was to improve the students' level of training before attending laboratory practices, to standardize the evaluation among teachers and to involve students in the process of assessment in order to improve learning outcomes and the quality of the reports delivered. The improvement action included, on one side, carrying out an initial evaluation with a diagnostic test. The results of this test were used to estimate the basic knowledge of the students and proposing specific tutorial sessions in order to unify their level of knowledge. This method should increase the students involvement and improve the success while performing the laboratory practices. On the other side, rubrics were created in order to standardize the correction criteria. These rubrics were also made public to the students, before the classes, in an attempt to improve the quality of their reports. In addition, for some of the reports the students were asked to self-assess their own reports following the public rubric. The results indicate that teachers found the rubrics useful for objective and fair evaluation. However, the standard deviation across teachers has not been apparently reduced with respect to the previous year by the use of them, although the differences in the student cohort have to be taken into account. The effect on grades of the factors teacher and session, as well as their interaction, was significant (p<.05) according to the ANOVA tests, as already was prior to the application of the action. It was also found that the student grades in the practical classes did not improved significantly. A low implication in the preparation before classes and a low tutorial attendance were observed in the collective of students, possible explaining in part the discrete improvements obtained. The self-assessment improved the grades on average where it was applied. We concluded that the involvement of both students and teachers is necessary to promote learning quality using these techniques

Systematic development of courseware systems

Various difficulties have been reported in relation to the development of courseware systems. A central problem is to address the needs of not only the learner, but also instructor, developer, and other stakeholders, and to integrate these different needs. Another problem area is courseware architectures, to which much work has been dedicated recently. We present a systematic approach to courseware development – a methodology for courseware engineering – that addresses these problems. This methodology is rooted in the educational domain and is based on methods for software development in this context. We illustrate how this methodology can improve the quality of courseware systems and the development process