Abstract:

Service learning is a teaching and learning concept that integrates curriculum with organized service projects. It is a philosophy, pedagogy, and model for community development. Students use their academic knowledge and skills to address community needs. They should learn to recognize social needs, to take them up and to work out possible solutions. At the Technical University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg Georg Simon Ohm (GERMANY), the concept of service learning was implemented in several projects. Two of them are content of this article. One challenge of the task to establish service learning at universities is to find institutional frameworks for this kind of work. A module called “IT Applications in Business” is a part of the curriculum of the bachelor’s degree program in Information Systems and Management. Content of this module is business process management or the development of IT-solutions in cooperation with real-world companies. The students work in small groups and are continuously guided and advised by a professor. Additionally, the students learn to present their results and to write project reports. The conditions of this module are an adequate frame for a non-profit project. In service-learning projects, partners from the real world are not companies but instead non-profit organizations.

One of these projects for IT-students was the web site relaunch of an association to save the rain forest. The students had to identify the requirements of the stakeholders. This was challenging because the members of the committee of the association were not IT professionals and were not used to IT vocabulary. After the web site relaunch, students experienced that the committee was not aware of the IT possibilities and the requirements changed often. This was sometimes exhausting and frustrating for the students. In the end, the association was happy to get a website relaunch free of cost und the students gained experience in working with non-IT-experts.

The other project was the development of a mobile app for homeless people. Task of this group was to interview homeless people about their information needs and to find out which contents are useful for them in a mobile app. These students experienced what it was like to work in a completely foreign environment. They got in contact with people they had never spoke with before. They had to conduct interviews with homeless people to identify usable requirements. They attended a guided tour with a homeless person to see his places of interest. This was a valuable experience to strengthen their social skills.

At the end of these projects, students were questioned about their specific experiences. They were asked about their opinions about their projects, the challenges they encountered and their motivation. All of them were highly content with the learning results from their projects. The non-profit partners were very happy to get professional IT support. The concept of service learning created a win-win-situation for all partners. Nonetheless, some significant challenges had to be mastered.

Keywords:

Service Learning, Requirements Engineering, Information Systems and Management, Project based learning.