You are my clients: A multi-disciplinary software development project

Vincent To Yee Ng, Kam Hong Chloe Lau, David Jones, Pearl Shum

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

Recently, there are many good examples of how multi-disciplinary learning can support students to learn collaboratively and not solely focus on a single professional sector. In past years, we have arranged students taking different subjects within the Department of Computing to work in groups for joint projects. One observation is the lack of application domain knowledge amongst many of the completed projects. There is a need to bring in business elements while not introducing much demand in resources. In Fall 2011, we have attempted to gather students studying different professional domains together. Three groups of students from the Department of Computing (COMP) and the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) are involved. The first group of SHTM students is planning a conference event in 2012 with over 300 guests. These students act as the customers who require a banquet management system as well as a delegates managing application. The role of the second group of SHTM students is to manage the development projects with the support of IT consultants who are in fact the COMP students. During the semester, different communication channels have been set up to facilitate the inter-group and intra-group communications with the support offered by an e-learning system, Blackboard. In addition, there are classroom presentations given by the SHTM students and prototype demonstrations prepared by the COMP students. Pre-project and post-project questionnaires have been given to all participating students in order to assess their gain in professional and business knowledge in 2 different areas, namely database application development and conference management. In this paper, we would like to report our experience, problems and the difficulties encountered in this multi-disciplinary pilot project.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 7th International Conference on eLearning
Pages336-345
Number of pages10
Publication statusPublished - 17 Dec 2012
Event12th European Conference on e-Government, ECEG 2012 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: 14 Jun 201215 Jun 2012

Conference

Conference12th European Conference on e-Government, ECEG 2012
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period14/06/1215/06/12

Keywords

  • Multi-disciplinary learning
  • Software engineering
  • Teamwork

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Business and International Management
  • Management of Technology and Innovation
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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