Collaborative and Cooperative-Learning in Software Engineering Courses

Abstract

Collaborative learning is a key component of software engineering (SE) courses in most undergraduate computing curricula. Thus these courses include fairly intensive team projects, the intent being to ensure that not only do students develop an understanding of key software engineering concepts and practices, but also develop the skills needed to work effectively in large design and development teams. But there is a definite risk in collaborative learning in that there is a potential that individual learning gets lost in the focus on the team's success in completing the project (s). While the team's success is indeed the primary goal of an industrial SE team, ensuring individual learning is obviously an essential goal of SE courses. We have developed a novel approach that exploits the affordances of mobile and web technologies to help ensure that individual students in teams in SE courses develop a thorough understanding of the relevant concepts and practices while working on team projects, indeed, that the team contributes in an essential manner to the learning of each member of the team. We describe the learning theory underlying our approach, provide some details concerning the prototype implementation of a tool based on the approach, and describe how we are using it in an SE course in our program.