Using Collaborative Technology in CS Education to facilitate Cross-Site Software Development
Marie Devlin, Sarah Drummond, Andrew Hatch
With offshore computing becoming more prevalent, it is
essential that we increase our students’ employability by
providing new and relevant experiences in software
development and project management; giving them valuable
skills that are essential in an ever-increasing and changing
global market. What is new about the work we discuss here is
how collaborative technologies have facilitated a year-long
cross-site software engineering project between Durham
University and Newcastle University students. Our use of
various collaboration technologies such as online discussion
forums, video-conferencing, company repositories, version
control software etc., as part of the collaborative team project
has not only encouraged students to develop technical
‘transferable’ skills but also gain an understanding, through
realistic experiences, of how the use of these technologies
involves more than just learning their technical aspects and
operation, but that it is essential to develop and implement the
soft processes and skills required to use them successfully and
effectively and hence optimize their cross-site working
partnerships and productivity. In this paper we describe the
project, the technologies employed by the student teams and the
results and anecdotal evidence of staff and students that show
the successes and, it must be admitted, occasional failures of
this work. We discuss how we have tried to manage the
expectations of the students throughout the project, how the
technologies we have provided have affected the students’
experience of cross-site collaboration and the impact of crosssite
collaboration on our assessment strategies and curriculum
design. Full Text
|
