Using a wiki to facilitate learning on a Requirements Engineering course

In this paper, we describe the introduction of a wiki for collaborative activities in a Requirements Engineering course offered at a distance to part-time learners. The paper describes the course and how wiki activities were incorporated. The paper then discusses the initial feedback from the students which shows that the wiki has been largely effective for developing students' understanding of the course concepts, the effectiveness of team working in Requirements Engineering and the use of wikis in practice. However, there are particular issues related to asynchronous working in distance education/eLearning that need to be better addressed. We conclude with a discussion of how we are tackling these issues and developing the use of the wiki on the course based on the students' feedba

An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

Wikis supporting authentic, collaborative activities: lessons from distance education

The Open University delivers distance learning to its students. Traditionally, its students work independently of each other. Looking to enhance their students learning, two postgraduate courses have introduced authentic, collaborative activities. This is easier to achieve now because of the availability of wikis: a lightweight, web-based collaborative authoring environment. This paper examines the effect of the wikis’ functionality on the students’ use of the tool, and the consequences for the students’ engagement with the activities and learning opportunities. This is a relatively large scale study involving 56 wikis produced by over 250 students. The data was drawn from the two courses using a variety of methods. A qualitative inductive analysis was used to look for emergent themes. These were validated by cross referencing, to match recorded comments with wiki content. We found that the limited functionality of wikis influenced how students engaged with the collaborative activities. While all groups were able to collaboratively author the documents required for assessment, they were not always produced in the way intended by the course teams. This meant the expected benefits of collaborative learning were not always realised. This paper will be of interest to academics aspiring to employ wikis on their courses and to practitioners who wish to realise the potential of wikis in facilitating information sharing and fostering collaboration within teams

Wikis supporting authentic, collaborative activities: lessons in usability

The Open University delivers distance learning to its students. Traditionally, its students work independently of each other. Looking to enhance their students learning, two postgraduate courses have introduced authentic, collaborative activities. This is easier to achieve now because of the availability of wikis: a lightweight, web-based collaborative authoring environment. This paper examines the effect of the wikis’ functionality on the students’ use of the tool, and the consequences for the students’ engagement with the activities and learning opportunities. This is a relatively large scale study involving 56 wikis produced by over 250 students. The data was drawn from the two courses using a variety of methods. A qualitative inductive analysis was used to look for emergent themes. These were validated by cross referencing, to match recorded comments with wiki content. We found that the limited functionality of wikis influenced how students engaged with the collaborative activities. While all groups were able to collaboratively author the documents required for assessment, they were not always produced in the way intended by the course teams. This meant the expected benefits of collaborative learning were not always realised. This paper will be of interest to academics aspiring to employ wikis on their courses and to practitioners who wish to realise the potential of wikis in facilitating information sharing and fostering collaboration within teams

FDTL voices : drawing from learning and teaching projects

This publication draws on insights and experiences from individuals and teams within learning and teaching development projects in higher education. It considers lessons learnt from the processes, outcomes and tangible outputs of the projects across the spectrum of the FDTL initiative, with the intention that colleagues can draw on and benefit from this experience. The overriding theme at the heart of every FDTL project has been the desire to achieve some form of positive and meaningful change at the level of the individual, institution or discipline. The continuing legacy of the programme has been to create wider community involvement as projects have engaged with the higher education sector on multiple levels - personal, institutional, practice, and policy. This publication has remained throughout a collaborative endeavour, supported by Academy colleagues. It is based around the four themes emerging from the initiative as a whole: • Sectoral/Organisational Change • Conceptual Change • Professional and Personal Development Partnership and • Project Managemen

Collaborative Requirements Engineering Notation for Planning Globally Distributed Projects

Requirements engineering represents a critical phase of the software development lifecycle in which requirements describing the functional and non-functional behaviors of a system are elicited, modeled, analyzed, negotiated, agreed, and specified. In traditional software systems these tasks are typically performed in face-to-face meetings between requirements engineers and the project level stakeholders. However, in today’s global software development environment, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for stakeholders to be dispersed across multiple geographical locations and time zones. Under these circumstances, face-to-face meetings become expensive, and often impossible to facilitate, and as a result the success of the requirements process relies, at least partially, on tools and processes that support distributed communication and collaboration. To investigate the challenges and effective practices for performing requirements activities in distributed environments, we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with project managers and business analysts who have worked with non-co-located stakeholders. Since many project managers fail to plan and deploy the necessary infrastructures to support quality communication, and in practice requirements are often elicited and managed via email exchanges; we introduced a visual modeling notation to help project managers proactively plan the collaboration infrastructures needed to support requirements-related activities in globally distributed projects. An underlying meta-model defines the elements of the modeling language, including locations, stakeholder roles, communication flows, critical documents, and supporting tools and repositories. The interview findings were further analyzed to identify practices that led to success or created significant challenges for the projects; resulting in a set of patterns for globally distributed requirements engineering