Work-in-Progress: International Student Cooperation in Capstone Research Project

摘要

Conducting a single course across international boundaries impacts both the students and the instructors. Interestingly, many of the impacts are the same. In essence, while the international team of students is working on their project, the international team of instructors is working on their own project-the course itself. In our case we deliver a joint course for more than 100 students spread across three international campuses on three different continents with three different business cultures. The main course goal is to prepare students for real IT projects that are based on distributed software development, covering all project phases: short definition of project task, gathering the data and creating the requirements list, dividing the team roles, creating the project plan along with time-line and budget-line, developing, testing and deploying the final project, documenting the project and proposing plans for maintenance and further support. At the end of the course students need to peer-review their team members; these evaluations are a significant part of the students' final grades. Our past experience showed that as a whole, students were very satisfied with the experience and knowledge they gained during our Capstone course. This was particularly evident with anecdotal comments by alumni.