Abstract:

Higher education institutes offer practical and project-based teaching and learning to prepare the next generation for their future jobs. For example, in Computer Science courses students work on different software projects as a team and submit their results at the end of the course. Unfortunately, some of the results are never used again. However, there are some practices where these results are reused, e.g., by giving the results to the students of the next semester to continue the project and take it to the next level. The goal of this study is to gather these practices and learn about the experiences of lecturers about reusing methods and determine advantages, disadvantages, and barriers.

The concept of reuse is particularly popular in the field of engineering. Taking computer science as an example, concepts such as modular reuse of components and open-source development for the purpose of exchanging valuable components and ideas are now an integral part of modern software development. It has become standard practice to reuse ideas in the professional environment, in the field of education it is still not widely practiced.
While it is common to reuse teaching materials, e.g., Open Education Resources there is a high potential to increase the reusability of student project results. The scope of this work is mainly on the students’ results produced within seminar- and project-based courses. There the students are working on different new topics and come up with their own solutions. In some cases, the students are even identifying and selecting the topic themselves. The results of these projects are mainly creative and unique. This sets them apart from the courses where the same lab experiment is conducted each semester by students and the results are known.
The research question is: How are project results in Computer Science reused at higher education institutes?

Based on that, the following study objectives were established:
1. Gather the types of artifacts that are produced by students in project-based courses
2. Identify use cases of reused project results
3. Determine chances, barriers, and practices to make project results
reusable

Therefore, a qualitative Interview was conducted with 14 lecturers from 3 higher education institutes in Germany and Finland. The results showed that the lecturers find it important to reuse the project results and had different approaches to it, but there are also barriers that make this process time-consuming for both lecturers and students.

The practices gathered in this paper can inspire the teaching community to conceptualize a reusability approach for the results produced within their project-based courses.

The presentation will be done in-person at the conference. During the presentation, the audience will be given the opportunity to share their experience with reusability of artefacts via the online tool Mentimeter. The possibility to evaluate, expand or comment on the collected barrier and practices will be given.

Keywords:

Reuse, computer science, project work, higher education.