Abstract:

The Senior Development Project as a capstone research project was already introduced in [1]. Our institution, with its international campuses in USA, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, is setting a new level of distance and collaborative education that enables students to form different cultures and time zones to work together on real projects in a controlled, academic setting, but in a manner that mirrors business and industry projects to a very significant degree. Three instructors are delivering this course jointly on three continents.

This remote, synchronous delivery has both advantages and disadvantages. Students are more aware of one another and fully understand, subconsciously, that they are being taught the exact same material to the exact same standards. However, the technology still does not provide a smooth interface that provides the same immersive experience as face-to-face communication. There are also issues with motivating the students who are sitting alone in the classroom while the instructor is physically at the other campus.

Students form joint teams of 6 – 7 team members that are not just international, but also multidisciplinary – Web and Mobile Computing (WMC) students work together with Computing and Information Technologies (CIT) and also, more recently, Human-Centered Computing (HCC) students. This creates a real need for the students to deal with the many issues of distributed teams, project coordination, and customers to give feedback through assessment of students projects.

Each year students work on different projects and over the last three years we offered multiple projects randomly divided on teams – each team works on a single project, but about four teams on average work on any particular project, competing with each other. In order to assess projects, it is crucial to set the benchmark for assessment of their project work and learning outcomes. In this case, the classical way of student evaluation through exams and in-class work is not applicable due to project specifics. That’s why we introduced innovative assessment tools like writing intensive papers, project and user documentation, gate reviews, sponsor input, video quizzes and at the end heavy dose of peer evaluations. This paper will describe this assessment factors in order to achieve better student experience and feedback. The key aspect, however, is that the course exposes our students to the typical projects, as well as the cultural and technical problems, that they will encounter in the workplace and it is important to assess that work in a comprehensive and innovative way. This is in sharp contrast to most other schools where this capstone work is purely hypothetical and the projects exist only on paper.

References:
[1] S. J. Zilora, M. Zagar, and A. Raza, “Communication challenges in international education,” Proceedings of 2018 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), pp. 1455-1458, 2018.

Keywords:

Gate reviews, writing intensive documentation, peer evaluation, video quizzes, capstone project.