How to increase the students' degree of involvment and participation in project based courses?

Abstract

The degree of students’ involvement and participation in non-examinatory parts of courses at higher level, such as lectures, is often significantly lower than in the examinatory parts. This can especially be seen in project based courses, where the main examination form is done through the application of theory into a practical project, rather than through a written examination. More specific, this paper focuses on two such courses, from the area of software engineering. The courses are given on the second, respectively third year, of the Bachelor Programme in Software Development, at Kristianstad University. These are also part of the academic loop1 of the programmes. Here, the lectures were replaced by seminars based teaching, with the purpose of raising the students’ degree of active - involvement and participation into the courses, ensuring a better learning quality, enabling more interaction between the groups of students, and finally facilitating a higher application of the theory into the practical project. Through concrete examples, the paper will show case the changes that were made in these two courses, with regard to the learning outcomes, the academic loop, and formative examination forms, such as seminars, with the purpose of increasing the qual-ity of teaching and learning. Finally, the immediate positive effects of these changes show we need to look further on how we can find more innovative ways of teaching and learning, especially in the project based courses, in order to increase student’s degree of involvement and participation.