Struggling to Keep Tabs on Capstone Projects: A Chatbot to Tackle Student Procrastination

Capstone projects usually represent the most significant academic endeavor with which students have been involved. Time management tends to be one of the hurdles. On top, University students are prone to procrastinatory behavior. Inexperience and procrastination team up for students failing to meet deadlines. Supervisors strive to help. Yet heavy workloads frequently prevent tutors from continuous involvement. This article looks into the extent to which conversational agents (a.k.a. chatbots) can tackle procrastination in single-student capstone projects. Specifically, chatbot enablers put in play include (1) alerts, (2) advice, (3) automatic rescheduling, (4) motivational messages, and (5) reference to previous capstone projects. Informed by Cognitive Behavioural Theory, these enablers are framed within the three phases involved in self-regulation misalignment: pre-actional, actional, and post-actional. To motivate this research, we first analyzed 77 capstone-project reports. We found that students’ Gantt charts (1) fail to acknowledge review meetings (70%) and milestones (100%) and (2) suffer deviations from the initial planned effort (16.28%). On these grounds, we develop GanttBot, a Telegram chatbot that is configured from the student’s Gantt diagram. GanttBot reminds students about close landmarks, it informs tutors when intervention might be required, and it learns from previous projects about common pitfalls, advising students accordingly. For evaluation purposes, course 17/18 acts as the control group ( N=28 ) while course 18/19 acts as the treatment group ( N=25 students). Using “overdue days” as the proxy for procrastination, results indicate that course 17/18 accounted for an average of 19 days of delay (SD = 5), whereas these days go down to 10 for the intervention group in course 18/19 (SD = 4). GanttBot is available for public usage as a Telegram chatbot.

Promoting Privacy Considerations in Real-World Projects in Capstone Courses with Ideation Cards

Nearly all software built today impinges upon end-user privacy and needs to comply with relevant regulations. Therefore, there have been increasing calls for integrating considerations of compliance with privacy regulations throughout the software engineering lifecycle. However, software engineers are typically trained in the technical fields and lack sufficient knowledge and support for sociotechnical considerations of privacy. Privacy ideation cards attempt to address this issue by making privacy compliance understandable and actionable for software developers. However, the application of privacy ideation cards in real-world software projects has not yet been systemically investigated. The effectiveness of ideation cards as a pedagogical tool has not yet been examined either. We address these gaps by studying how teams of undergraduate students applied privacy ideation cards in capstone projects that involved building real-world software for industry sponsors. We found that privacy ideation cards fostered greater consideration and understanding of the extent to which the projects aligned with privacy regulations. We identified three main themes from student discussions of privacy compliance: (i) defining personal data; (ii) assigning responsibility for privacy compliance; and (iii) determining and exercising autonomy. The results suggest that application of the cards for real-world projects requires careful consideration of intersecting factors such as the stage at which the cards are used and the autonomy available to the developers. Pedagogically, ideation cards can facilitate low-level cognitive engagement (especially the cognitive processes of meaning construction and interpretation) for specific components within a project. Higher-level cognitive processes were comparatively rare in ideation sessions. These findings provide important insight to help enhance capstone instruction and to improve privacy ideation cards to increase their impact on the privacy properties of the developed software.

A postgraduate capstone project: Impact on student learning and organizational change

The capstone course serves to integrate accumulated knowledge with a culminating experience or project and is a common component in undergraduate and graduate programs. The research on capstones courses shows that many capstone experiences or projects involve students working with outside clients, such as local businesses and organizations, to solve problems or develop new projects or campaigns. Such capstone experiences or projects seek to offer students real-world, career-building experience, while the clients seek to benefit from the learned academic knowledge of the students. Where the literature is scarce on client-based capstone projects is when the client is the student’s employer or career-related organization. A graduate program in administration at a public Midwestern university in the USA offers a different approach to the student–client model by requiring a degree-culminating capstone project that challenges adult students to apply their learned knowledge to solve administrative problems not for an outside client but at their place of employment or career-related organization. The researchers surveyed 66 alumni and interviewed 6 on how the capstone project had benefited their work-related learning and its impact on their employer or career-related organization. Students perceived an improvement in their ability to define and analyze administrative problems in their workplace, while the employers or organizations which implemented the project recommendations experienced positive organizational change. This case study contributes to the literature on capstone courses by examining the relevance of a work- or career-related capstone project to students and their workplace.

Ocean I3. Pedagogical Innovation for Sustainability

Universities are undertaking transformation projects that align their work with the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper describes how Ocean I3, an educational innovation project that aims to reduce plastic in the sea, has made an impact on its community over its three editions (2018/19 to 2020/21). Methodologically, it has been approached by the people who make up the technical team and academic coordination as an exploratory study using discrete, non-reactive techniques, mainly from the public domain (websites, blogs, press releases, etc.), and instruments, such as field notes and work material to manage, organize, and train within the project. The analytical procedure has represented a dynamic and systematic process of categorisation. The results highlight the repercussion of the project in terms of capstone projects, master’s thesis, coursework, etc., produced by the students involved; association with employability; collaborative work from the teaching teams; monitoring experience for research purposes, and social dissemination of the project. It concludes by suggesting lines for Ocean I3 to work on in the future to make its footprint sustainable in institutions over time.