Experience Report on the Use of Technology to Manage Capstone Course Projects

This full paper presents an experience report describing lessons learnt from innovative practice use of technologies in an undergraduate computing capstone course. At our school, around fifty-five teams comprising of around 300 students take this course every year. With fifty-five teams, we needed a system to schedule presentations; improve communications; collaborate between stakeholders; share knowledge; monitor progress; team up students; match students to projects; improve grading process; showcase posters; and track improvements using analytics. The Learning Management Systems (LMS) is great to manage course content and grade submission. On the other hand, students are required to conduct agile sprint reviews with university internal and external stakeholders. The LMS forum requires external stakeholders to be registered and adhere to the university terms of use. Instead of using the LMS forum, we used a wiki. Wiki is a flexible platform used by various stakeholders to collaborate and contribute, we used it as a delivery platform for assessment as well. However, wiki lacks finer user access control and complex workflow features. In our capstone course we need workflows to schedule milestone presentations based on stakeholder's changing availabilities; to match students to teams using a content-based recommendation system; and to showcase project posters. We build custom systems to meet these workflow needs by proposing them as capstone course projects for our students. We share the lessons learnt from building custom systems. By sharing our experience, we hope to support more teachers willing to innovate in their use of technology in teaching.