Design and Supervision Model of Group Projects for Active Learning

Abstract

This research paper presents a group project framework for a second-year programming course, which was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework offers well defined stages of the group project which allow students to work on their choice of a real-world problem, integrate their learnings from previous courses, and present a working solution. In the group project, students actively participate, reflect, and contribute to achieving the goals set in the learning objectives of the course. Our framework incorporates key features from Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory (1984) and principles of active learning from Barnes (1989) to achieve active and experiential learning through active supervision. The use of group projects as a teaching pedagogy is widely adopted in many universities. Students work together, develop a plan, and demonstrate their abilities in building on existing knowledge acquired from previous courses, and apply them appropriately for problem solving. Prior to the pandemic, it was the norm for students to work on their group projects together by meeting physically on campus. Key benefits of working together physically are having the support of one another and the ease of communication. With the onset of the pandemic, safe distancing measures, and restrictions put in place have made it challenging for students to work on group projects together. During the pandemic, many courses were forced to move online with limited face-to-face learning opportunities on campus. This posed great challenges to the faculty in terms of effective supervision of students and their project progress. To mitigate the challenges, we devised a flexible strategy that makes use of both technology-based and non-technological means for monitoring students' group project milestones. The faculty receives continuous updates from students as they work towards each milestone. These milestones serve as important checkpoints for students. Continuous checks at different milestones help the faculty adopt appropriate intervention measures as issues arise. The group project learning framework consists of three main stages, namely Group Formation, Scoping of the Project, and Group Solutioning. The framework is overlaid with Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory concepts to describe the learnings, milestones, and deliverables of each stage. Each of these stages adopts Barnes's principles of active learning to enable active participation, reflection, and contribution by students. We evaluated the success of this framework through a comprehensive student survey analysis. The survey asked specific questions to students on all stages of the group project and the overarching component of teamwork and working online. We also present our findings and lessons learned for improvements of the framework. We believe that our framework will be valuable to educators in computing programs that wish to adopt effective supervision measures for group projects.