This paper reports on a case study of the Agile Kanban project methodology, which while growing in popularity, has had far less analysis on its usefulness in the classroom as compared to other frameworks such as Agile Scrum. Our study provides insight into why the Kanban methodology is useful by mapping student comments about the methodology to…

Many traditional Information Systems (IS) programs are either redesigning current courses to incorporate business/data analytics or expanding curricular offerings to include business /data analytics; our IS program chose the former route to meet the demand (from employers) for business/data analytics. In that transition, a traditional systems…

Information systems capstone projects aim to prepare students for what they will encounter in the industry after graduation. Corporate application development is often a complex endeavor that requires coordination between related products. For example, software development in the mobile application sector may require a coordinated parallel…

Agile methods such as Scrum that emphasize technical, communication, and teamwork skills have been practiced by IT professionals to effectively deliver software products of good quality. The same methods combined with pedagogies of engagement can potentially be used in the setting of higher education to promote effective group learning in software…

Systems Analysis and Design (SA&D) is the cornerstone course of a traditional information system curriculum. Conventionally, it is a sequence of two courses with the second course dedicated to the completion of a project. However, it has recently become more common to reduce the two-course sequence into one, especially for IS departments that…

Information-systems development continues to be a difficult process, particularly for virtual teams that do not have the luxury of meeting face-to-face. The research literature on this topic reinforces this point: the greater part of database systems development projects ends in failure. The use of virtual teams to complete projects further…

There are many different delivery methods used by institutions of higher education. These include traditional, hybrid, and online course offerings. The comparisons of these typically use final grade as the measure of student performance. This research study looks behind the final grade and compares student performance by assessment type, core…

Information Systems instructors are generally encouraged to introduce team projects into their pedagogy, with a consequential issue of objectively evaluating the performance of each individual team member. The concept of "freeloading" is well-known for team projects, and for this, and other reasons, a peer review process of team members,…

Creation of teams in professional and student contexts has been well researched and written about. The research landscape can be divided into instructor selected and student selected teams, both of which have advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of this paper is to combine the two techniques for creating teams in an effort to maximize the…

Contemporary Information Systems graduates will be more marketable in the workplace upon graduation if they have combined competencies in both technical and soft skills: interpersonal communication, teamwork, time management, planning and organizational skills. Team and project-based learning can be used to incorporate soft skill competencies with…

Student team project work in higher education is one of the best ways to develop team working skills at the same time as learning about the subject matter. As today's students require the freedom to learn at times and places that better match their lifestyles, there is a need for any support for team project work to be also available online. Team…

In BSc/MSc engineering programmes at Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), the need to provide students with teamwork experiences close to a real world environment was identified as an important issue. A new group-formation method that aims to provide an enriching teamwork experience is proposed. Students are asked to answer a…

Information Systems (IS) projects are increasingly staffed by cross-functional teams working together to solve complex tasks. To better prepare students for this business reality, higher education institutions need to integrate team projects within their courses. Despite good intentions, these team projects do not always have the desired outcomes.…

Although group project concepts and skills have become a major component in most information systems (IS) academic programs, very little research has attempted to examine factors that may improve or undermine effectiveness of IS group projects. Accordingly, based on relevant literatures, this study develops and empirically tests a model of factors…

This paper focuses on the difficulties of assessing multi-year team projects, in which a team of students drawn from all three years of a full-time degree course works on a problem with and for a real-life organization. Although potential solutions to the problem of assessing team projects may be context-dependent, we believe that discussing these…