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KISEK - EQIBELT COLLABORATION

As a part of the efforts put in Kisek project outcomes in a field of Software Engineering in education, a collaboration between Kisek and another Tempus project in Croatia was established. This Tempus project is called Eqibelt (Education Quality Improvement by e-learning Technology), coordinated by the University of Zagreb, University Computing Centre. This Tempus project is aimed to better implement the e-learning methodology into higher education system in Croatia, foster the usage of e-learning and provide better support for teachers who engage themselves in these processes.

 

On October 26th, 2007., an invited lecture was held on Eqibelt's 3rd Policy Workshop on Pedagogical Opportunities of E-Learning. Prof. Mario Žagar, Kisek coordinator and professor of Computing, was presenting a topic "Distributed Software Development Course - Student Experience", a project-oriented distributed course in Software Engineering.

 

The workshop gathered professionals from Western European countries, but also from Croatia, to present and discuss current trends, examples and best practices in educating all generations, especially young ones, by means of Information and Communication Technology.

 

The term of global software development has been present in the field for the last ten years and is based on distributed software development, regardless of geographical (kilometres, countries) and time distances (time zones) of the teams involved in the development of the same product. Apart from the familiar problems characteristic of «centralised» program engineering, in distributed software development there are additional problems in the establishment of communication between the distributed teams, caused by differences in professional cultures, languages etc.

 

In cooperation with Mälardalen University (MdH), Västerås, Sweden, a pilot project of DSD (Distributed Software Development) course was conducted during the academic year 2003/04, in which the teaching staff and students from both faculties were included in joint instruction delivery and development of student projects. The goals of the project were threefold:

  • Examine the possibilities and evaluate the risks of maintaining distributed instruction (connecting two locations in real time through Internet streaming of image and sound) by using available communication resources
  • Evaluate the feasibility and risks related to the development of student projects which involve simultaneous participation of teams from both faculties
  • Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the existing virtual learning environment, suggest improvements through project tasks for the next generation of students

As the pilot project proved itself to be very well accepted by the students, which described it as a "Great new experience", this course continues to live, in this distributed way, for the students of the 5th year of Computing. This fall, we are happy to work with the 5th DSD generation.

 

If you'd like to find out more about Distributed Software Development Course, take a look at: http://www.fer.hr/rasip/projekti/rpi/en

 

You can also download "Distributed Software Development Course - Student Experience" presentation.


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