CCLI-A&I: Sustained Service Learning Projects in Software Engineering Project Courses

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Computer Science (31)Ohio University is collaborating with the Purdue University EPICS Program, the Center for Community Service, the Center for Teaching Excellence, the Nelsonville Public Library, the Office of Code Enforcement and Community Development, and the City of Athens, OH to adopt and integrate the service learning approach pioneered by Purdue University; the "stabilize-and-enhance" approach proved effective by Rice University; and the open-source software development approach to structure software engineering project courses. For software engineering project courses, service-learning projects are a rich source of real-world projects that offer students the opportunity to solve complicated technical problems while interacting with real-world clients. Software engineering educators, however, hesitate in adopting service-learning projects because projects from community partners with different backgrounds and needs are often dramatically different and are not as well structured as traditional academic projects. It is difficult to 1) manage in one class different projects that require entirely different toolsets, languages, platforms, and even have different timelines; 2) evaluate different projects from different community partners and give consistent grades; 3) ensure that service learning projects proposed by community partners are interesting and beneficial to them and in the meantime appropriate for the class with respect to scope, size, and difficulty; and 4) facilitate the adoption of cross-term, cross-team projects to accommodate community partners in need of larger projects. Intellectual Merit: To overcome these challenges, Ohio University is developing an educational software process named GROw (Gradually Ripen Open-source Software) that facilitates cross-term, cross-team project development. In addition, OU is developing consistent grading rubrics for different projects and guidelines to assist community partners to provide appropriate project requirements. Broader Impact. While the open-source approach has been proven effective and scalable in practice, the impacts of this approach on software engineering courses have not been fully studied. This project is pioneering a systemic way to apply the open-source approach on large, multi-term service-learning projects. Through service learning, this project is providing benefit to participating community partners and helping to produce educated software engineers who have a stronger sense of civic responsibility.