Robin I Munkvold

To prepare IT graduates for professional careers, their education must provide them with "real-life" experience. There are many tasks beyond those of core software engineering and development for which students need training: project management, team building, software estimation and planning, progress tracking, and communication. Project- based learning offers ways to transfer learning of foundational and practical knowledge into "real projects for real clients". The Department of Computer and Information Science at the NTNU has a long tradition for relying heavily on project courses in the education of candidates, both in its 5 year integrated study program (Master of Technology / siv.ing.) and its Bachelor Informatics program. The emphasis on projects follows naturally from the fact that projects are the main working style in the IT industry. The amount of project work in the study plan is scheduled to increase further by study program changes currently being implemented. The programs in question however also maintain a share of more traditional courses where the dominant learning activities are textbook reading, lectures and weekly exercises, so the education as such is not entirely project-based. Furthermore, it is difficult to turn to an entirely project-based style when there are courses from different departments, for instance generic mathematics courses with a huge number of students. Hence, despite the numerous benefits of project-based learning, several practical challenges need to be addressed as we attempt to implement this strategy in a hybrid educational context. The question posed in this article is: Could it be possible, in spite of maintaining a mixture of project-based and other learning styles in a program, to take project-based learning a step further than being applied in single courses? There are several ways projects can be extended between or across different courses, each with potential advantages and disadvantages. For instance, projects can be supported from the contemporary learning systems for fast feedback and continuous monitoring of the progress. Projects can also be shared among several courses taking place in the same semester, or among courses taking place in subsequent semesters. Even more radically - extrapolating the idea of a student e-portfolio - one could consider each student's entire university education as a project, the project goals being the learning goals for the study program in question and single courses being considered as work packages contributing to these overall goals. This might motivate students and allow them to appreciate the whole picture rather than looking at courses as narrow and isolated achievements with a strong focus on exams and grades. The paper provides a classification of different ways in which project learning can be taken beyond the single course context even in study programs where it is (at least in the short term) unavoidable to have a mixture of projects and more traditional teaching.

Learning through construction in higher IT education, where students design and develop IT-artifacts (software, apps, etc.) in project-based work, is a way of preparing students for the world outside, working in the intense industry of Media Technology. An active learning process, where students create software, also involves a variety of academic emotions. This paper presents the results of a survey done with 127 students following a bachelor course, focusing on the academic emotions experienced throughout the course period. The research question is "Which emotions do students experience in an academic setting of learning through construction?" The findings provide insights on academic emotions among students working in teams to create concepts for learning apps.

The paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of the top 50 free educational apps in Norway on March 3rd 2016 and September 3rd 2015, focusing on how the apps can be used in a learning process. The apps were analyzed based on a number of educational categories, e.g. which pedagogical method is the app built upon, what level of the revised Bloom's taxonomy does the app cover and what are the added values of the app compared to traditional classroom teaching. The research question of the study is: What are the educational characteristics of the most popular apps in the Norwegian App Store? We found that the apps are based on a variety of pedagogical methods. There is a predominance of drill and practice-apps, but there are also apps based on presentation, tutorial, gaming and demonstration in addition to discovery, problem solving and simulation. Discussion and collaboration as pedagogical methods are not found among the apps from the top 50 charts. Some apps allow for construction of content, like images, audio, video, mind maps etc. We have demonstrated how many apps cover the lower level of Bloom's revised taxonomy, but that some of the apps also can cover the Create level of the taxonomy. It is not hard to describe added values of most of the apps, if one sees the factors isolated from each other. Examples of added values are repetitions, immediate feedback, fun, creative tools, variation, and pronunciation. The paper discusses how added values also can turn into distractions and how many of the “free” apps unfortunately have major limitations in the free version.

The research full paper examines what kind of IT tools (software and hardware) are used in project-based IT courses, where students create digital artefacts like games, apps, audio, VR worlds, web sites etc. The analysis is based on data from 46 IT courses, collected during the spring and fall semesters of 2017 at two Norwegian universities. The analysis of these data has led to a classification of the tools used by students in PjBL and guidelines for ensuring progression of tool usage in course design and study program design. The IT tools were classified into the following categories: Collaboration; Communication; Developer Platforms; Physical Tools; and Project Management. The analysis is done with reference to the existing body of literature on active learning, e.g. constructivism and constructionism, and taxonomies for learning. The study discusses ways in which tools may be used to enhance learning in the Creating level of Bloom’s revised taxonomy. The data was further analyse...

To prepare IT graduates for professional careers, their education must provide them with "real-life" experience. There are many tasks beyond those of core software engineering and development for which students need training: project management, team building, software estimation and planning, progress tracking, and communication. Project- based learning offers ways to transfer learning of foundational and practical knowledge into "real projects for real clients". The Department of Computer and Information Science at the NTNU has a long tradition for relying heavily on project courses in the education of candidates, both in its 5 year integrated study program (Master of Technology / siv.ing.) and its Bachelor Informatics program. The emphasis on projects follows naturally from the fact that projects are the main working style in the IT industry. The amount of project work in the study plan is scheduled to increase further by study program changes currently being ...

The paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of the top 50 free educational apps in Norway on March 3rd 2016 and September 3rd 2015, focusing on how the apps can be used in a learning process. The apps were analyzed based on a number of educational categories, e.g. which pedagogical method is the app built upon, what level of the revised Bloom's taxonomy does the app cover and what are the added values of the app compared to traditional classroom teaching. The research question of the study is: What are the educational characteristics of the most popular apps in the Norwegian App Store? We found that the apps are based on a variety of pedagogical methods. There is a predominance of drill and practice-apps, but there are also apps based on presentation, tutorial, gaming and demonstration in addition to discovery, problem solving and simulation. Discussion and collaboration as pedagogical methods are not found among the apps from the top 50 charts. Some apps allow for co...

In experimental study with 1780 adults who participated in distance education, it was shown that gamification did not have an effect on performance, drop-out rate and pass-rate compared to a control group. Although no effect was shown, descriptive survey data suggests that the students were positive towards having similar gamification in other courses and would likely recommend the course due to the design. While previous research on gamification in online education indicates that gamification can have a positive effect, gamification researchers highlight the importance of context and design for successful implementations. The present study supports the need for context considerations and psychological design in gamifying online education. Furthermore, the present study highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of engagement measures in gamification research and for more practical frameworks regarding the successful application of gamification in online education.

Our exploration of peer assessment in the formative feedback of themes within ITL111 Digital Competence for teachers (15 ECTS) and GEO102 Physical Geography (15 ECTS) is based on support from tools within the LMS, sets of learning based outcomes, rubrics and Six Thinking Hats. The overall effect is improved quality of the student assignments and deeper learning. The best results were registered with the use of rubrics where the students were presented with clearly defined criteria for expected performance on a sample of different themes within the course. In order to perform the peer review, the students had to acquire the basic knowledge of the various themes. In addition, seeing how others solved the assignment provided the student with reflections on the themes that would improve the student's own final portfolio.

In the Norwegian Center for Excellence in IT education (Excited), there are 19 IT study programs across two universities with six campuses. One of the goals of Excited is to gain more knowledge about “learning through construction”(LtC) in IT studies. The paper presents preliminary findings on characteristics of courses with “learning through construction” in bachelor and master courses with project-based learning in the spring semester of 2017. The LtC courses are characterized through a number of variables from a categorization model of project courses: teaching context, range of implementation, learning context, institutional context, personnel composition, grading, project variety, degrees of freedom of the process and in the deliverables. Our findings show that “learning through construction” is often used as a learning method in higher IT education because constructive skills are a highly valued learning outcome, and to develop such skills, it is necessary to practice. At the ...

This study is based on a survey study distributed in the fall of 2017 in Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. The study was designed by a group of researchers from the Nordplus Horizontal project: Digital Computer Games for Learning in the Nordic Countries, to uncover teachers’ perceived obstacle in regard to using digital game-based learning in teaching situations. The results indicate that the teachers included in this study did not have enough information and knowledge about games and gamification tools to be used in teaching. The findings show that technical obstacles are the most experienced hurdle among the respondents in all three countries when it comes to applying games or gamification tools in teaching activities. There are not many differences to be observed gender wise. A common difference that is worth noticing, is the difference between women and men regarding their reporting on the obstacle ‘knowledge/skills’, where more women claim this to be an obstacle. From these results, the paper proposes three types of digital game-based learning guidelines, namely (1) rhetoric framing of usability and learnability, (2) engagement and (3) creating a guidance area – building a DGBL infrastructure. In conclusion, the paper calls for further empirical studies on the actual situation presented in this paper, to reach an informed discussion about questions that are of real concern for many parties, including teachers, school leaders, children and researchers.

Learning through construction in higher IT education, where students design and develop IT-artifacts (software, apps, etc.) in project-based work, is a way of preparing students for the world outside, working in the intense industry of Media Technology. An active learning process, where students create software, also involves a variety of academic emotions. This paper presents the results of a survey done with 127 students following a bachelor course, focusing on the academic emotions experienced throughout the course period. The research question is "Which emotions do students experience in an academic setting of learning through construction?" The findings provide insights on academic emotions among students working in teams to create concepts for learning apps.