Abstract:

The paper studies the impact of introducing team work assignments on student learning in a basic IT course, taught in the first year of the BA level. The course covers basic IT and Internet services characteristics and principles, as well as the most important moments in IT evolution. The course combines classical teaching methods with interactive methods and e-learning tools. We compare student results and feed-back consequent to introducing the team-work assignment with the ones obtained in previous years.

We briefly overview the course characteristics, which have been described in previous papers. For the student feed-back analysis, we used the data provided by the official UBB teacher evaluation tool, which is included in our university’s academic information system AcademicInfo. The results obtained in the academic year 2019-2020 are compared with the ones obtained in the previous three academic years.

The course educational material are available on the faculty’s moodle e-learning platform. The course content and issues regarding previous systems were detailed in previous papers.

The team assignment we have introduced had several aims: teaching students how to work on a small research project, how to work in a team, divide responsibilities and share results, how to publicly present their work, as well as to understand and further research the impact of IT on our present day life, in different fields, in the form of electronic activities – e-activities. Each team was supposed to choose a topic from a large list, like e-learning, e-libraries, e-media, e-administration, e-government, e-voting, e-banking. e-payment, e-meetings, e-business, e-commerce, etc. and to focus on case studies and analyses on specific countries or regions (from the EU or world-wide). The assignments were supposed to comply a research project structure, including: project goal; methodology; case study; comparisons, analyses, interpretations; conclusions and references. Each team member had to cover a certain part and of course, team members had to discuss with each-other, share opinions and results in the benefit of the project.

We noticed a genuine emulation among the students regarding working together on the assignment, discovering new information about the studied topic, analyzing, synthesizing and comparing specific data on the studied topic and presenting the work to their colleagues. The teams presented their assignment as PowerPoint presentations, using a beamer and having their colleagues and the teacher as an audience.

We analyze the results obtained by the students in the academic year 2019-2020 and we compare them with the ones obtained along the previous 3 academic years, discussing the impact of the team assignment. Adding the team assignment had a beneficial impact on the students’ grades and on the course satisfaction. The course feed-back results were higher than the ones obtained in the previous academic years, the Gauss distribution curve being more obvious.

Using UBB’s teacher evaluation tool, students have graded the course with an average of 4.5, on a scale 1-5, where 1 is very poor and 5 is very good, higher than in previous years (around 4). Students expressed a general positive feed-back towards the course content, the acquired knowledge and blended learning teaching methods, and the new experience of their first research assignment and team work, all these aspects leading to an overall good to very good rating of the course.

Keywords:

Basic IT course, student feed-back, teaching IT concepts, blended learning, interactive educational resources, team-work, educational impact.