Experiences and Lessons from Onsite and Remote Teamwork Based Courses in Software Engineering

What is it about?

Education is changing rapidly towards digital and online forms in universities. E.g. digitalization and Massively Open Online Course (MOOC)s evolve remote education tools, which changes the teaching approaches. Covid-19 accelerated digital transition from classroom-based education towards hybrid models, then online classes and finally to fully online education. While the education has moved from classrooms to Internet environment, the suitability of this transition has not really been evaluated. This is especially important to teamwork based courses in which the collaboration within teams and between teams is considered a major part of the learning outcomes of the course. Our study presents experiences on transforming a set of software engineering courses from a fully onsite course to a fully online course and lessons we have learned on that transition. We analyze hackathon and capstone style courses for traditional and remote execution modes. We have used hackathons for decades and have experience of different types of implementations. For capstones we have two different courses that we have experience with. Analyzing the team-based courses shows focal points which area hard to solve with online approaches. Online environment does not only make students faceless to the teacher but also to other teammates. This is especially visible in the long-lasting capstone courses.

Featured Image

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Education is changing rapidly towards digital and online form. Covid-19 accelerated digital transition from classroom-based education towards hybrid models, then online classes and finally to fully online education. While the education has moved from classrooms to Internet environment, the suitability of this transition has not really been evaluated. This is especially important to teamwork based courses in which the collaboration within teams and between teams is considered a major part of the learning outcomes of the course. We present experiences on transforming a set of software engineering courses from a fully onsite course to a fully online course and lessons we have learned on that transition. Online environment does not only make students faceless to the teacher but also to other teammates. This is especially visible in the long-lasting capstone courses.