P1 Getting students involved in theoretical elements of a practice-based project course – The students' perspectives
Background and purpose
Higher education should prepare students for future work life. However, the emphasis on theory sometimes overshadow more practical elements in learning activities [1]. Project courses were the students work together in groups to take an idea to a functional or a “least viable” product has proven to be a successful way to incorporate the reality of working life into higher education, especially in computer science [2]. At the royal institute of technology (KTH), students at the Civil engineering program in Computer Science encounter such a project-based course during the second half of their second year. The course Software Engineering in Project Form, DD1369, introduces students to real life software development projects, provided by real clients, for example companies and organizations. The students then work in teams of eight to develop the required product.
However, the students’ still need to obtain sufficient theoretical knowledge of software development [2]. In the course, this was originally done by scheduling traditional lectures on relevant topics throughout the course. But the students rarely participated, creating a gap between theory and practice in the course. This led to the students only learning about the theoretical aspects related to the particular project, missing out on other important aspects of software development. As an alternative approach, the traditional lectures were replaced by a more collaborative learning activity that we called Student Conference Seminars (SCS) during the spring semester of 2022. In these SCS, the students were given the responsibility to prepare and present theoretical topics to their peers while also relating them to the practice of their respective project. Other student groups were then in charge of leading a Q&A session and discussion, with the purpose of engaging more students in discussions about the applications of theory in their practical work.
The purpose of this presentation is to outline some of the experiences and conclusions from this endeavor and answer questions such as, how did the students respond to the SCS and, what were the benefits and challengers of this flipped approach in terms of closing the gap between theory and practice?
Finished work/ongoing work
The change from traditional lectures to SCS was the culmination of many smaller changes to the course made on the course throughout the last three years. Our presentation focuses on a smaller part of a larger study [3] which aims at evaluating the preparations and learning outcomes of introducing an overall agile methodology to the course. Among other data collected for the project, this presentation introduces the results regarding how the students responded to the flipped approach of SCS in surveys and one to one interviews.
Results/observations/lessons learned
Being a work in progress, our observations so far is that the students initially approached the SCS activity with some skepticism. Only 26.5 % of the students stated that they preferred the SCS to traditional lectures, whereas 17.3 % actually found them to be a worse learning experience. At the same time, 44.9 % agreed that they became more activated and motivated to participate in the SCS than they would in traditional lectures, which was also supported by the interviews. In addition, 55.1 % stated that the seminars had little or complete impact on their projects.
Take-home message
In order to incorporate sufficient theoretical frameworks into courses involving real life projects, flipping the classroom beyond the project itself by introducing SCS instead of traditional lectures seems to get students more involved in theoretical aspects of the course. Giving the students not only the practical experience of working in software development projects, but also a wider knowledge of the subject matter.
References
- Raelin, J. A. Toward an Epistemology of Practice. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 6(4), 495–519, 2007
- Marques, M, Ochoa, S. F., Bastarrica M. C. and Gutierrez F. J. , Enhancing the Student Learning Experience in Software Engineering Project Courses, in IEEE Transactions on Education, vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 63-73, 2018
- Hussain, D., & Söderlindh, L. Software engineering, bridging theory and practice in an agile learning environment. In 2022 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) (pp. 541-546), 2022
