The overall research goal of this thesis is to investigate how to foster beneficial collaborative interaction in an online environment. In this context, beneficial interaction is defined as opportunities that can lead to actions which can further a student’s learning or project goals. Collaboration has to be initiated by an actor in a system, and thus a collaborative system cannot directly create collaboration. The design philosophy selected in this case is to create opportunities for interaction and environments that will encourage positive feedback loops in regard to collaboration. When increasing collaboration efficiency, it creates more opportunities in this context for the actors in a classroom to collaborate around project or learning goals for the same amount of spent effort.
The main research goal of this study has been divided into smaller research questions that build on each other. The first research objective is to document the current state of collaborative environments and methods in Software Engineering Education (SWEE). The second step is to use the results of the first study to create requirements for a computer-supported collaborative environment and to create a design that satisfies these requirements. The effectiveness of the design and the completion of the research goals will be evaluated by using design science research methodology, which involves evaluating the design by creating prototypes based on these designs and then evaluating the prototypes. The final objective
communication and collaboration patterns.
To summarize, the main research questions of the study are:
RQ1a. What collaboration-related communication and activities occur in collaborative software engineering courses?
RQ1b. What kind of issues or needs exist in collaborative communication and activities that still need be addressed, in the context of collaborative software engineering courses?
RQ2. How can mutually beneficial activities and communication be increased in software engineering courses with a computer-supported collaborative environment?
RQ3. How does a computer-supported collaborative learning environment, with design based on the results of RQ1 and RQ2, affect intra- and inter-team student communication and collaboration?
To achieve the research goals, a research programme has been carried out in a series of stages that build on the results of the previous stages. Figure 1.1 shows the progress of the research stages towards increased complexity and completeness of the research, and the dependencies between the publications. The presented stages result from grouping the publications and do not come from an established research framework. The overarching research approach for this thesis is design science, in which a solution is designed to address a specific problem, and the validity of the solution is confirmed by its utility (Hevner et al., 2004). The form of the Design Science Research Method (DSRM) adopted for this study consists of six major parts (Peffers et al., 2007): problem identification and modification, solution definition, design and development, demonstration, evaluation, and communication. In chapter 2.1 the stages of the research programme are related to the design science framework.
Stages I and II establish the motivation for the research project and the research gap. The first two stages center around answering the research questions RQ1a and RQ1b. The motivation for the research programme was established when classroom collaboration was studied with interaction analysis and the results indicated that some patterns of collaboration were suboptimal. The research method used in the interaction analysis was Social Network Analysis (SNA), which is an interdisciplinary method of modeling interactions and analyzing them quantitatively with the help of the graph theory (Otte and Rousseau, 2002). SNA was also used to establish a baseline level of collaboration to be used in the evaluation of later solutions. After defining the initial motivation, a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) of literature was performed to confirm that there still existed a gap in the current level of research that could be addressed. The
18 1 Introduction
II. Systematic Mapping Study on CSCL
systematic mapping study is a specific method of a literature review, which provides a general overview of a research field and can be used to establish a research gap (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007; Petersen et al., 2008).
Stage III concentrates on requirements gathering, investigating existing collaboration tools, and answering RQ2 by creating an initial solution design to improve student collaboration, which aims first at increasing collaboration between individuals. The main avenue of research in this stage is gamification, which is the application of game-like elements to a non-game environment (Deterding et al., 2011), because gamification has has been shown to motivate the users of online systems (Groh, 2012; Herranz et al., 2015) and has potential to increase collaboration between students (Moccozet et al., 2013). This solution design is evaluated by creating and deploying a prototype as a part of a software engineering university level course.
Stage IV builds on the lessons learned from the previous stage. In this stage a custom collaboration solution for intra- and inter-team collaboration was created and evaluated in order to answer RQ3. Gamification and the self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985) were the main theories used in the design due to the positive results gained in stage III test iteration. Similarly, this design was evaluated by creating and using a prototype as a part of a class environment.
This is aligned with the design science research methodology, which is an iterative approach where the design and development cycles are repeated and the design evaluated until the requirements are satisfied. A further advance in gamification was designed in stage IV, but because of practical constraints the final
was moved to a future research project.