Improving collaborative learning in online software engineering education

ABSTRACT

Team projects are commonplace in software engineering education. They address a key educational objective, provide students critical experience relevant to their future careers, allow instructors to set problems of greater scale and complexity than could be tackled individually, and are a vehicle for socially constructed learning. While all student teams experience challenges, those in fully online programmes must also deal with remote working, asynchronous coordination, and computer-mediated communications all of which contribute to greater social distance between team members. We have developed a facilitation framework to aid team collaboration and have demonstrated its efficacy, in prior research, with respect to team performance and outcomes. Those studies indicated, however, that despite experiencing improved project outcomes, students working in effective software engineering teams did not experience significantly improved individual achievement. To address this deficiency we implemented theoretically grounded refinements to the collaboration model based upon peer-tutoring research. Our results indicate a modest, but statistically significant (p = .08), improvement in individual achievement using this refined model.

KEYWORDS:

• Teamwork
• collaborative learning
• social construction
• online learning
• peer tutoring

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Colin J. Neill is Associate Professor of Software and Systems Engineering and Director of Engineering Programs in the School of Graduate Professional Studies, Penn State Great Valley. He teaches in the graduate systems engineering, software engineering, and engineering management programmes both in resident and online. He is the author of over 70 articles and books on software and system design, engineering teams, and engineering education. He also serves as associate editor-in-chief of Innovations in Software and Systems Engineering: A NASA Journal.

Joanna F. DeFranco is Assistant Professor of Software Engineering in the School of Graduate Professional Studies, Penn State Great Valley. Dr DeFranco holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, a M.S. in Computer Engineering from Villanova University and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from New Jersey Institute of Technology. She teaches in both the resident and online software engineering, systems engineering, and engineering management graduate degrees. She has published a number of articles in journals and conference proceedings in the area of technical teams and engineering education.

Raghvinder S. Sangwan is Associate Professor of Software Engineering in the School of Graduate Professional Studies, Penn State Great Valley. Dr Sangwan received his Ph.D. in computer and information sciences from Temple University. His work involves design and development of software systems, their architecture, and automatic and semi-automatic approaches to assess their design and code quality. Prior to joining the Pennsylvania State University, he was a software architect at Siemens where he worked on large scale systems many of which were developed by teams geographically distributed around the world. This experience resulted in his co-authoring the Global Software Development Handbook.

ORCiD

Colin J. Neill http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8712-0918

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Research Initiation Grant from the Center for Online Innovation in Learning (COIL-RIG) at Penn State University.