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Improving learning and soft skills using Project Oriented Learning in software engineering courses Julieta Noguez, Enrique Espinosa

Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey Campus Ciudad de México. Calle del Puente 222, Col Ex Ejidos de Huipulco, México D.F. CP14380 México D.F. {jnoguez, enrique.espinosa}@itesm.mx Phone: (52) (55) 54-83-21-80

Abstract. We present a study that identifies student behavior, development of soft skills and learning improvement during a project oriented software engineering course at the B. Sc. Level. Assessment of behaviour characterized as soft skills and knowledge when students work in a collaborative way is hard to achieve, but useful for effective tutoring. We contribute to constructing a strategy for applying self-assessment on collaborative actions that take place in the classroom, assuming that such actions are the manifestation of the learning process. Project Oriented Learning (POL) considers that students will work on a single guiding thread, or project, for an entire course. We present a research trend that allows the process to be managed, as well as three years of in-class results. Key words: Project Oriented Learning, Cooperative Learning, Soft skills.

1. Introduction. There is a worldwide discussion on how to teach engineering students at higher education levels because of society changes and new requirements concerning skills, abilities and ethic values of future engineers. An ever increasing number of academic institutions are undergoing a search new methodologies and didactic techniques which enable undergraduate students to face real professional situations [7]. Students must be scaffold in order to have them perform properly when they must organize themselves as teams, and play roles while delegating work onto themselves, and when delivering feedback to their teams. Overall success in these terms is not easily measurable, since most of the learning process will take place outside the realm of the computer system and will thus have to be assumed whenever there is evidence of its existence through visible actions [4]. Besides it is hard to prove that students are motivated to learn when the instructor applies POL to their classroom activities. Johnson states “… changing to a cooperative style is not simple. There is a big difference between putting students into groups to learn… and structuring your teaching so students learn cooperatively...” [6]. The project oriented technique provides the following advantages [1,10]: • •

It allows the students to learn how to solve problems using relevant knowledge independently of the discipline source. Activities are focused in exploring and working a practical problem with an unknown solution.

• • •

They are designed in such a way that at least last for a curse, they can involve several contents of the same discipline or the interaction of different disciplines. They consider in their design the application of different interdisciplinary knowledge so the student can appreciate the relationship between different disciplines in the development of a particular project. Allowing the search of open solutions so students are free to create new knowledge.

The Project Oriented Learning (POL) didactic strategy portrays active learning as an educational paradigm that transforms direct experience into a tool for supporting, and stimulating, learning [9,11]. The following descriptions and results, applying POL, are made in the “Software Engineering I” course at the Mexico City Campus, Tecnológico de Monterrey System. The subjects are held for 4th semester students of CS majors. A more detailed description of the POL technique application will be described, as well as the importance of a portfolio in the process of critical thinking of acquired knowledge and abilities [8].

2. Course Description The following [general] objectives of the software engineering course were defined: Know, understand, and apply the analysis and design methodologies during the development of computerized information systems in organizations. Identify problems in the use of information technologies in order to plan, analyze, design, and construct information systems with a creative solution. To achieve these goals, the student needs lead, and coordinate, so she/he will be able to develop robust and easy maintainable information systems. Preparing technical documentation and manuals are necessary for the maintenance of information systems. A reflection process is a very important tool for students. They need to construct a portfolio for learning-by-doing management, conflict resolution, and overall synthesis of all products derived from the final team integration and maturity. It also serves to point out elements that have not been completed, and thus contribute to the overcome flaws which may appear throughout the course. 2.1 Soft and technical skills. Besides of these activities, we chose different soft and technical skills to develop during this course, as shown in table 1. Table 1. The desired technical and soft skills to work in this course Soft Skills Team work. Leadership. Responsibility. Self directed learning. Honesty. Management. Planning. Negotiation.

Technical Skills Capacity to identify and solve information management problems in companies. Applying tools to model information systems. Development of an information system (planning, analysis, design, development, testing, and so on). Development of technical documentation and manuals of the system.

2.2 Learning and soft skills approaches. We have two approaches. We describe the first approach in this course for sophomore developers. The students need to integrate previous knowledge of basic programming and data structures and to apply software

engineering concepts of this course to develop a transaction process system. Because the students have little or no project management experience, teacher planning is needed to have pre-defined milestones and breadth is fixed before hand. The course is in a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) [2]. All the teaching material and support structure (i.e. presented as content in an author static tool called Blackboard) are to be used by the student, while teamwork and assessment, actions that allow learning to actually occur, will be stored as behavior evidence of collaborative actions. In practical terms, a Blackboard course delivery of POL courseware must include facilities for observing and recording concrete experience, observations & reflections, formulation of abstract concepts & generalization, and testing implications of concepts on situations. The students can choose their own workload and the team is responsible of their balancing. The fixed goals related with learning and soft skills are assessed by selfperception. Our second approach is applied in a course for senior developers. It means the students have project management experience. We use web software based in a contract, that allows the process to be managed and assessed. The course uses a Computer Supporting Collaborative Work (CSCW) [2]. The authors proposed that a workflow with written compromises, called a Work Contract, is a socially accepted tool because it is modelled as a consulting device. The students should to have a planning project filling in a contract due dates, product list, task competitions, etc. and, the team is responsible of the workload balancing. The web system follows behaviour students by mechanistic perception of the student’s soft skills based on probabilistic reasoning. To see more detail in Espinosa, 2004 [5].

3. Using POL to evidence learning. During a consulting & learning-type semester, a guiding thread that asks the students to build an information system of medium complexity, and a portfolio of project are running. The portfolio records are made up of the following phases [4]: hiring and contractual agreements, system analysis and design components, integration and recovery units and recapitulation and delivery actions. The group process to develop the consulting project will consist on establishing the following steps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

At the beginning of the course we ask the students to reflect on their expectations towards the course, their actual knowledge level concerning the course and their commitment to contribute to the course success. During the following two weeks the students obtain knowledge about the group building process, responsibilities of a leader, conflict resolution strategies and project management tools The team itself, that is, who conforms it, and what are each member' s strengths and weaknesses. Commit contract. From the third week on teams will be formed and start their team project. At this point, they made and sign a formal inside contract specifying the roles of each participant. Each team contains five members, and during each phase of the semester the leading role should be changed The teams are asked to do weekly reflections on their work, using a portfolio in Blackboard [3]. Some reflections are individual and some collaborative (reflections about: group conflicts, expectations, goals, progress, answer what works properly? are there troubles? what can we improve?).

Three milestones and a final presentation were defined to show project advances and make team reflection. The instructor uses this information to supervise the progress of each team by reading the reflections and inferring soft skills and learning goals. In case of problems, the teacher can interfere in the process depending on the conditions and circumstances of the team. We use a decision support system during POL management on the learning content management. We combine team reflections of self-perception with teacher assessments by technical goals delivered. We show in table 2, examples of some rules to assess group process, also it is shown an example to assess a technical goal delivered. During the process, information system is programming and testing using module techniques. The four-unit course deals with the ability to integrate these, using the project plan and specifications developed in one unit. As a result, the work contract will be modified once again, specifying all changes, revisions, and additions to the architecture and

system model. These two, architecture and model, must be partially executable by now, so a set of demos and test cases must be included in the job plan. Success in building a coherent set of test suites will evidence that integration is becoming a reality, or will prove weaknesses in the development plan, the business specs, or the group' s performance as a team. Table 2. Examples of rules to assess group process and technical goals delivered Group Failure groupFailure(Gx) iff Read(PROF, WRF) Λ groupAutoperception(Gx, weak teamwork, WRF ) groupFailure(Gx) iff Read(PROF, WRF) Λ groupAutoperception(Gx, good teamwork, WRF ) Λ ¬ techGoalsDelivered(Gx,WRF)

Technical Goals Delivered techGoalsDelivered(Gx,WRF) iff GradingConcept(Gx,index(WRF,1),PASS) Λ GradingConcept(Gx,index(WRF,2),PASS) Λ … GradingConcept(Gx,index(WRF,k),PASS) Λ Count(index(WRF,h) 7)

Where: PROF= Professor, WRF= work auto-assessment, Gx=Team,

PASS= approved

4. Results. The pedagogical method has been applied for six consecutive semesters with success. The POL technique and portfolio use have proven to be an excellent tool for improving learning-by-doing, conflict resolution, and overall synthesis of all products derived from the final team integration and maturity. It also serves to point out elements that have not been completed by students, and thus contribute to decreasing team failures relative in the course. A final questionnaire is applied at the end of each semester about different aspects of project oriented approach in this course. In figure 1 we show the students’ opinion about which kind of activities they thought helped them learn better.

Percent

Students' opinion about how learn better 90,00% 80,00% 70,00% 60,00% 50,00% 40,00% 30,00% 20,00% 10,00% 0,00%

Collaborative job Self Job Teacher Lectures

2001-01

2001-02

2002-01

2002-02

2003-01

2003-02

Semester

Figure 1. Students’ opinion about which kind of activities they thought learn better The questionnaires were applied to 60 students enrolled in two groups of 30 students. Eight teams, of 3 to 4 students, were formed in each group. We were refining POL course across the semesters, but in 2002-01 we tried to combine a Data Base course with this Software Engineering course. In this semester the main problem was the difficult to coordinate teachers of different courses (applying POL between teachers was hard). Also, we asked students about their perception of the soft and technical skills acquired during the course. In figure 2 we show main skills pointed out by students.

Students' perception about obtained soft skills during the course 100,00%

Capacity to Identify and Solve Problems

Percent

80,00%

Team Work

60,00% 40,00%

Leadership

20,00%

Responsibility

0,00% 2001-01 2001-02 2002-01 2002-02 2003-01 2003-02

Self Directed Learning

Semester

Figure 2. Students’ perception about obtained soft skills during the course A high percentage of students consider that they developed specific soft and technical skills in this course. This question was included in the package of questionnaires described above. Each skill has some variations because we were refining POL course across the semesters. Finally, we were recording the final assessment of knowledge tests and projects like evidence of improving learning. The results are shown in figure 3. Average results of final assessments 100,00

Grades

80,00 Final exam

60,00

Final Project Final exam/without POL

40,00

Final Project/Without POL

20,00 0,00 2001-01 2001-02 2002-01 2002-02 2003-01 2003-02 Semester

Figure 3. Average results of final assessments These results were obtained of the same sample of 60 students enrolled in two groups of 30 students. Eight teams, of 3 to 4 students, were formed in each group. We also included information about a 30 students group without apply POL technique.

5. Conclusions and future work. We presented project oriented learning in a software engineering courses and using it to give evidence about learning improvement and development of soft skills. The results shown the main advantages of this approach: (i) it improves student learning, (ii) the students become concern about their strong and weak points, (iii) the project quality is improved, and (iv) the students obtain professional and personal skills in strong relation to their future work field We found some difficulties: (i) the roles of the teacher as consultant, coach and professor still need to be refined, because is the same teacher attending each course, and the professor still needs to spend a considerable amount of time with the students, both individually, and as teams, or even as groups of teams, (ii) there is a mayor

work load for students, (iii), at the beginning of this approach, there was a resistance to change roles (students and teachers), (iv) combining more than one course in a same project is hard, and (v) applying POL between teachers is also hard. Until now we have two approaches from fixed goals to free goals as you can see in figure 4. We described in this work, only the first approach.

Learning and soft skills approaches Self-perception

FIXED GOALS

assessments

LCMS 4th semester

BEHAVIOR

monitoring analysis

FREE GOALS

Mechanistic perception

CSCW 8th semester

Figure 4. Learning and soft skills approaches We would like to look for a convergence of these two approaches in order to improve learning and softskills assessments based in student’s behavior using Project Oriented Learning.

6. References [1] Algreen H. and Moesby E. Assessment Guide for Students. Aalborg University, Denmark. 2001 http://aua2.aua.auc.dk/fakktekn/aalborg/engelsk/index [2] Arevolo W., Lundy J., Phifer G. and etal. Hype Cycle for Corporate e-learning. In Gartner Research. Strategic Analysis Report. June 25th , 2004. [3] Blackboard is a trademark by Blackboard Inc. http://www.blackboard.com [4] Espinosa E. Noguez J. Assisting Students with POL using XML- Aglet Federation. 47th World Assembly. Teacher Education and the Achievement Agenda. Amsterdam. Julio, 2002. [5] Espinosa E., Noguez J. Project Oriented Tutoring on Milestone Behavior using contract management. Publishing in advance in: 34th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference. 2004. [6] Johnson R. How can we put cooperative learning into practice?. The science teacher. Vol 67. No. 1. January 2000. pp 39. [7] Martín M. El modelo educativo del Tecnológico de Monterrey. Ed. Tec de Monterrey. Monterrey, Nuevo León. México. 2002. pp 17-29. [8] Noguez J. Espinosa E. Using a Portfolio for the Didactical Technique Project Oriented Learning in some Computer Systems Subjects at ITESM-CCM. 47th World Assembly. Teacher Education and the Achievement Agenda. Amsterdam. Julio, 2002. [9] Oosterhuis-Geers J.A. BITskills. Education Center. Internal Report. Business Information Technology. University of Twente. Netherland. May 1997. http://www.unimaas.nl/pbl/general/general001.htm [10] Powell P. and Weenk W. Characteristics of Project Work. Dinkel Institute, University of Twente, Netherland. 2000 [11] Sabine, Dierick. ”Assesment in a problem-based learning environment”. ITESM-PBL Advanced Training Course. Univ. of Maastricht. June 2000. Lecture notes.