Category Archives: cooperative learning

Join us to discuss team based capstone projects on Monday 3rd February at 2pm UTC

Posted on by
CC licensed project icon from flaticon.com

There is no “I” in Team, but there is an “I” in University. Teamwork is a core skill taught in many Computing degrees. How can instructors help students improve their teamwork skills though collaborative projects? Join us on Zoom to discuss a paper investigating teamwork skills in the context of capstone projects published in ITiCSE iticse.acm.org [1]. From the abstract

Team-based capstone courses are integral to many undergraduate and postgraduate degree programs in the computing field. They are designed to help students gain hands-on experience and practice professional skills such as communication, teamwork, and self-reflection as they transition into the real world. Prior research on capstone courses has focused primarily on the experiences of students. The perspectives of instructors who teach capstone courses have not been explored comprehensively. However, an instructor’s experience, motivation, and expectancy can have a significant impact on the quality of a capstone course. In this working group, we used a mixed methods approach to understand the experiences of capstone instructors. Issues such as class size, industry partnerships, managing student conflicts, and factors influencing instructor motivation were examined using a quantitative survey and semi-structured interviews with capstone teaching staff from multiple institutions across different continents. Our findings show that there are more similarities than differences across various capstone course structures. Similarities include team size, team formation methodologies, duration of the capstone course, and project sourcing. Differences in capstone courses include class sizes and institutional support. Some instructors felt that capstone courses require more time and effort than regular lecture-based courses. These instructors cited that the additional time and effort is related to class size and liaising with external stakeholders, including industry partners. Some instructors felt that their contributions were not recognized enough by the leadership at their institutions. Others acknowledged institutional support and the value that the capstone brought to their department. Overall, we found that capstone instructors were highly intrinsically motivated and enjoyed teaching the capstone course. Most of them agree that the course contributes to their professional development. The majority of the instructors reported positive experiences working with external partners and did not report any issues with Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) or disputes about Intellectual Property (IP). In most institutions, students own the IP of their work, and clients understand that. We use the global perspective that this work has given us to provide guidelines for institutions to better support capstone instructors.

We’ll be joined by one of the co-authors Steve Riddle from Newcastle University, who will give us a lightning talk summary to kick-off our discussion. All welcome, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Sara Hooshangi, Asma Shakil, Subhasish Dasgupta, Karen C. C. Davis, Mohammed Farghally, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, Mirela Gutica, Ryan Hardt, Steve Riddle, Mohammed Seyam (2025) Instructors’ Perspectives on Capstone Courses in Computing Fields: A Mixed-Methods Study ITiCSE 2024: 2024 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, DOI:10.1145/3689187.3709608

Join us to discuss blended learning & pedagogy in Computer Science on Monday 6th July at 3pm

Posted on by
Reply
What is innovative pedagogy? CC-BY licensed picture by Giulia Forsythe

Join us for our next journal club meeting on Monday 6th July at 3pm, the papers we’ll be discussing below come from the #paper-suggestions channel of our slack workspace at uk-acm-sigsce.slack.com.

Show me the pedagogy!

The first paper is a short chapter by Katrina Falkner and Judy Sheard which gives an overview of pedagogic approaches including active learning, collaborative learning, cooperative learning, contributing student pedagogy (CSP), blended learning and MOOCs. [1] This was published last year as chapter 15 of the Cambridge Handbook on Computing Education Research edited by Sally Fincher and Anthony V. Robins. A lot of blended learning resources focus on technology, this chapter talks about where blended learning fits with a range of different pedagogic approaches.

A video summary of all sixteen chapters of the Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research, including chapter 15 which we’ll be discussing

Implementing blended learning

The second paper (suggested by Jane Waite) is Design and implementation factors in blended synchronous learning environments [2], here’s a summary from the abstract:

Increasingly, universities are using technology to provide students with more flexible modes of participation. This article presents a cross-case analysis of blended synchronous learning environments—contexts where remote students participated in face-to-face classes through the use of rich-media synchronous technologies such as video conferencing, web conferencing, and virtual worlds. The study examined how design and implementation factors influenced student learning activity and perceived learning outcomes, drawing on a synthesis of student, teacher, and researcher observations collected before, during, and after blended synchronous learning lessons. Key findings include the importance of designing for active learning, the need to select and utilise technologies appropriately to meet communicative requirements, varying degrees of co-presence depending on technological and human factors, and heightened cognitive load. Pedagogical, technological, and logistical implications are presented in the form of a Blended Synchronous Learning Design Framework that is grounded in the results of the study.

We look forward to seeing you there, zoom details are on the slack channel, email me if you’d like to request an invitation to the slack channel. Likewise, if you don’t have access to the papers let me know.

Short notes from the discussion

Some of the questions discussed on the day:

  • Inclusion raises a number of questions in terms of room management, gender balance – was this a consideration?
  • What effect do you think the absence of anyone F2F would have on the case studies and/or your outcomes?
  • How scalable is this approach? Can it be used with classes of 200 or 300 students?
  • Constructive alignment plays an important role in getting this kind of blended learning to work, see the work of John Biggs e.g. Teaching for Quality Learning at University book

Further reading from co-authors

Jaqueline Kenney, one of the co-authors of the paper we discussed joined us for the session (thanks again Jacqueline). Matt Bower also emailed some suggestions of work that follows on

  • See related work Collaborative learning across physical and virtual worlds: Factors supporting and constraining learners in a blended reality environment DOI:10.1111/bjet.12435 and blendsync.org
  • Bower, M. (2006). Virtual classroom pedagogy. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, Houston, Texas, USA. DOI:10.1145/1121341.1121390
  • Bower, M. (2006). A learning system engineering approach to developing online courses. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 8th Australasian Conference on Computing Education – Volume 52, Hobart, Australia. 
  • Bower, M. (2007). Groupwork activities in synchronous online classroom spaces. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, Covington, Kentucky, USA. DOI:10.1145/1227310.1227345
  • Bower, M. (2007). Independent, synchronous and asynchronous an analysis of approaches to online concept formation. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Dundee, Scotland. DOI:10.1145/1268784.1268827
  • Bower, M. (2008). The “instructed-teacher”: a computer science online learning pedagogical pattern. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Madrid, Spain. DOI:10.1145/1384271.1384323
  • Bower, M., & McIver, A. (2011). Continual and explicit comparison to promote proactive facilitation during second computer language learning. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Darmstadt, Germany. DOI:10.1145/1999747.1999809
  • Bower, M., & Richards, D. (2005). The impact of virtual classroom laboratories in CSE. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. DOI:10.1145/1047344.1047447As well, this Computers & Education paper specifically relates to a study of teaching computing online:
  • Bower, M., & Hedberg, J. G. (2010). A quantitative multimodal discourse analysis of teaching and learning in a web-conferencing environment–the efficacy of student-centred learning designs. Computers & education, 54(2), 462-478.

References

  1.  Falkner, Katrina; Sheard, Judy (2019). “Pedagogic Approaches”: 445–480. doi:10.1017/9781108654555.016. Chapter 15 of the The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research
  2. Bower, Matt; Dalgarno, Barney; Kennedy, Gregor E.; Lee, Mark J.W.; Kenney, Jacqueline (2015). “Design and implementation factors in blended synchronous learning environments: Outcomes from a cross-case analysis”. Computers & Education. 86: 1–17. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2015.03.006. ISSN 0360-1315.