Enhancing the Quality and Student Attitude on Capstone Projects Through Activity-Based Learning and Reduced Social Loafing

Abstract

Collaborative project work is inherently common in Undergraduate degree curricula. Yet many institutions face issues when implementing group work and assessing individuals to measure their skills gained due to diverse nature of groups, inconsistent knowledge levels and varied motivations. This chapter describes the integration of Activity-based learning into the development of an enhanced project module in an undergraduate degree in Information Technology. The learning design changed to incorporate several guidelines and mechanisms to improve the required skills in building a real-world solution for a problem at-hand. We report the results of applying this step-by-step approach when conducting the project module in consecutive two years of 2019 and 2020. Survey data collected from 120 students were analyzed to gain their perspective about the newly improved teaching-learning process. Further, the observations and experiences of the lecturers while conducting the session were also taken into consideration when analyzing the impact of the approach. The results indicated that introducing project-related in-class activities improves the student’s enthusiasm towards the project module. Mechanisms for reducing social loafing in fact reduced the number of free-riding complaints from the students. When considering the overall qualitative feedback and quantitative measures it was evident that students preferred project-based learning compared to module-based learning and the newly enhanced approach managed to reduce many issues that occurred in conducting the project modules using a traditional approach.