Ivana Bosnić

Context-Aware Recommender Systems for Learning: A Survey and Future Challenges

Recommender systems have been researched extensively by the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) community during the last decade. By identifying suitable resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices, such systems offer a promising approach to facilitate both learning and teaching tasks. As learning is taking place in extremely diverse and rich environments, the incorporation of contextual information about the user in the recommendation process has attracted major interest. Such contextualization is researched as a paradigm for building intelligent systems that can better predict and anticipate the needs of users, and act more efficiently in response to their behavior. In this paper, we try to assess the degree to which current work in TEL recommender systems has achieved this, as well as outline areas in which further work is needed. First, we present a context framework that identifies relevant context dimensions for TEL applications. Then, we present an analysis of existing TEL recommender systems along these dimensions. Finally, based on our survey results, we outline topics on which further research is needed.

Customers' Role in Teaching Distributed Software Development

This paper describes different aspects of teaching distributed software development, regarding the types of project customers: industry and academia. These approaches enable students to be more engaged in real-world situations, by having customers from the industry, local or distributed customers in universities, distributed customers in software engineering contests or being involved in an ongoing project, thus simulating the company merging. The methods we describe are used in a distributed project-oriented course, which is jointly carried out by two universities from Sweden and Croatia. The paper presents our experiences of such projects being done during the course, the differences in each approach, issues observed and ways to solve them, in order to create a more engaging education for better-prepared engineers of tomorrow.

Ten tips to succeed in global software engineering education

The most effective setting for training in Global Software Engineering is to provide a distributed environment for students. In such an environment, students will meet challenges in recognizing problems first-hand. Teaching in a distributed environment is, however, very demanding, challenging and unpredictable compared to teaching in a local environment. Based on nine years of experience, in this paper we present the most important issues that should be taken into consideration to increase the probability of success in teaching a Global Software Engineering course.

Avoiding scylla and charybdis in distributed software development course

Teaching Distributed Software Development (DSD) is a challenging task. A convincing simulation of distributed environment in a local environment is practically impossible. Teaching DSD in distributed environment is more realistic since the students directly experience all its specifics. However, teaching in distributed environment, in which several geographically separated teams participate, is very demanding. Different types of obstacles occur, from administrative and organizational to technical ones. This paper describes some of the challenges, lessons learned, but also success stories of the DSD course performed now eight year in a row.

Student motivation in distributed software development projects

In this paper we discuss challenges faced in conducting distributed student projects within a scope of a distributed software development university course. Student motivation and demotivation factors, along with perceived cultural differences, are identified and analyzed on the basis of data collected from a number of student projects.

Multi-dimensional assessment of risks in a distributed software development course

The organizational shift from local to global settings in many software development initiatives has triggered the need for entailing it when educating the future software engineers. Several educational institutions have embraced this need and started collaborating for the provision of global software engineering courses. The rather complex nature of such courses results in a wider range of risks, in comparison to standard software engineering courses, that arise in different dimensions, ranging from course-to result-related, and for different reasons. In this work we provide an assessment of such a variety of risks as well as their causes, and we give a hint on how they may affect each other based on our 10-year-long experience with a tightly integrated GSD course.

Introducing SCRUM into a Distributed Software Development Course

The growing enactment of Global Software Engineering in industry has triggered educational institutions to perceive the importance of preparing students for distributed software development. During the last twelve years we have disclosed advantages and pitfalls of GSE to our students through our Distributed Software Development course. After running the projects according to the iterative process model for eleven years, we decided to shift to an agile development model, SCRUM. This decision was due to the growing industrial adoption of agile methods, but more importantly to increase proactiveness, sense of responsibility, and to balance the workload among the project team members. In this paper we describe the process and outcomes of our first attempt at introducing SCRUM in our distributed course.

Exploring Students' Happiness in Distributed Software Projects

Teaching realistic Global Software Engineering in a university setting requires exposing students to intricacies of the approach by immersing them into simulated or real distributed projects. However, such an approach requires careful student and course management by the university staff, additionally hampered by reduced visibility of distributed teams. In this paper we describe the concept of happiness polls aimed at gaining better insight into dynamics of distributed student projects, and some preliminary results identifying the key process properties influencing students perception of development process.