Attracting and retaining students in information technology is a priority for most educational institutions. Millennials' (those born since 1982) learning and work preferences tend toward teamwork and experiential learning, and their strengths include a collaborative style of working. They are accustomed to working in teams with people with whom they "click," thereby fostering the social aspects of work. Prior studies indicate that female students are concerned about the insularity of working alone for long periods of time, as they perceive to be the case with computer science and IT careers. Educators are challenged to employ pedagogical techniques that appeal to the values and learning styles of Millennial students and, in the process, to create an educational environment that is more representative industry's distributed, virtual, and collaborative environment. A focus of the research will be on enhancing the Jazz environment to include distributed pair programming between members of a team and instructing students to be part of a collaborative, distributed team within this environment. Laurie Williams' research team has participated in the Sangam1 Eclipse plug-in which provides support for distributed and synchronous pair programming. This Sangam tool will be enhanced for inclusion in the Jazz environment and for other usability and functional requirements, in particular related to support collaboration throughout the software development lifecycle beyond programming. Tutorials to instruct students in the use of Jazz for use in a collaborative, distributed team project course will be developed. While the focus on these work items are on the education of students, both the Sangam plug-in and the tutorials will be useful for practitioners as well. An additional feature of our research will involve the use and study of a networked service-delivery platform to enable remote virtualized collaboration utilizing on-demand resources. For this we will investigate the use of NC State's Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) and novel ways to make Jazz quickly available on an as-needed basis.
Sponsor
- IBM Jazz Faculty Grants Program