Nicole Herbert

Reflections on 17 years of ICT Capstone Project Coordination: Effective Strategies for Managing Clients, Teams and Assessment

Many undergraduate ICT degrees culminate with students completing a team-based capstone project under academic supervision. Capstone projects provided by external clients facilitate authentic experiential learning, but sourcing external projects can be difficult, and there can be issues managing industry clients within an academic setting. Capstone projects also provide an opportunity for professional skill development to increase student employability, though to fully assess generic learning outcomes requires evaluating more than the final product created for the client. Teamwork can have a positive impact on student learning, however it is challenging to determine a process of assessment that enables formative and summative assessment that does not require an academic to immerse themselves within a team to evaluate an individuals contribution. Team members are often the best source of meaningful information, and self and peer assessment is commonly used as part of an assessment scheme, but to ensure the objectivity and integrity of the final grade it is necessary to correlate data from a variety of sources. This experience report reflects on a team-based capstone project approach that has been offered for 17 years and proposes some effective strategies for coordinating the more challenging aspects of capstone projects.

Is the ATAR a useful predictor of success in ICT?: an empirical study

The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) is a measure of a students overall pre-tertiary academic achievement. For most tertiary degree programs across Australia, the selection of year 12 domestic applicants is based on an ATAR, on the premise that selection based on a students overall academic achievement prior to university is a predictor of success for tertiary study. This paper is an empirical analysis into whether the ATAR and prior study in programming or mathematics can be used to predict student success in an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) degree. Our study has four key findings: the ATAR is not a significant indicator that a student will graduate on schedule from our ICT degree; the ATAR can be used as significant indicator that a student will successfully complete the first year of our ICT degree; the ATAR can be used as a significant indicator that a student will successfully complete our first-year introductory programming course; and finally, prior learning of ICT-related material is not a significant indicator of whether a student will pass or fail our introductory programming course on their first attempt.