STUDENTS COLLABORATIVE WORK DRIVEN BY SELF-STUDENT GOALS

In this paper we present the results of a study of the students collaborative work development during the teaching of the Advance Software Engineering subject corresponding with the last course of the Engineering in Informatics grade at the University of Córdoba.

A suitable number of students, with a comprehensive training gained thorough the degree, allows the development of team works where the students’ teams, those made by groups (both being the components randomly selected), must carry out the software development and deployment in a professional way.

The teaching model is based in the development of a set of activities, distributed in phases with a prewired milestones and an initially preset schedule. The planning beforehand determines that the different groups carry on with the different activity types along the work development, taking as the information source the work resulting from that activity in the previous stage that was developed by a different group.

This collaborative work model tries to improve cross competencies and attitudes such as: team work, responsibility, professionalism or companionship; skills that are taking into account afterwards during the evaluation process. The final evaluation, which rules are delivered to the student at the beginning of the course, is carried out both for the teacher and the students (self and peer evaluation).

Moreover, the work goals is set by the students, thus the software system to be developed is defined by the teachers and students at beginning of the course. The main constraint is the development of a system oriented to support the student university studies guided by the European High Education Area directives based on the Bologna Declaration.

The paper shows how the students motivation increase when the practice content learned (the goal) are close to students needed, and also increase other important learning issues as responsibility, professionalism, fellowship, etc.

Finally, in this paper, we describe the results obtained. Tips and Talks is a Web Portal built for students oriented to guide and help to students in their first contact with the University. This portal running at the University of Córdoba provide good advices and disprove the myths and legends transmitted by students for years. Assessment results are also described, self, peer and mate students evaluation combined with teacher evaluation improve the evaluation quality and the student satisfaction.