Teaching a global project course: experiences and lessons learned

  • Authors:

  • Peter Gloor;Maria Paasivaara;Casper Lassenius;Detlef Schoder;Kai Fischbach;Christine Miller

  • Affiliations:

  • Massachusettes Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;Massachusettes Institute of Technology & Aalto University, Cambridge, MA, USA;Massachusettes Institute of Technology & Aalto University, Cambridge, MA, USA;University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany;University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany;SCAD, Savannah, GA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2011 Community Building Workshop on Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In this paper, we describe the goals, organization and content of a global project course we have taught for the last six years, as well as challenges and lessons learned. The course has involved two to four sites and 30-40 students each year, both from Europe and the US. The students form project teams spanning several sites, and jointly perform creative tasks, thus learning both the course substance, as well as how to effectively work together in multicultural and multi-disciplinary distributed teams. We hope that our experiences described in this paper will help and encourage other universities to organize globally distributed project courses. In the future, we plan to continue working with this course, as well as search partners to develop a global software engineering project course together with other universities.