A Pilot Study to Inform the Design of a Supportive Environment for Challenge-Based Collaboration

Abstract

In the course "An introduction to FinTech: from mobile payments to blockchains", students are introduced to the broad area of FinTech, from both technical and business side. The course consists of two technical lectures that explain the students the basic technology for authentication and blockchain and two entrepreneurship lectures that discuss the fintech business ecosystem. In the rest of the course the students work on a project provided by companies in which they put into practice the obtained knowledge and provide a solution to a real life challenge. The course is face-to-face, with two weekly sessions of 2 h each. The students work in teams and each week they need to show progress/work towards the challenge resolution. The students are not constrained in any way and are asked to self organize for the team work. In this study we present the results we obtained from questionnaires that we delivered before the course on course expectations (that we used also to form the teams), during the course on teams' dynamics, and after the course to measure students' perception on collaboration strategies. We end the paper with a reflection on the design space for an application that can support this type of collaborative work online.

Conceptualización del aprendizaje colaborativo basado en retos aplicado a un caso de comercio internacional

“…Estos elementos son recogidos del estudio piloto realizado por la empresa Apple cuyo objetivo era hacer que la educación superior fuera más motivadora y relevante para los estudiantes (Baloian et al, n.d.;Leijon et al, 2022;Pisoni & Gijlers, 2020). Dicho estudio piloto se enfocó en la educación superior de ingeniería, con una visión hacia el aprendizaje como una experiencia multidisciplinaria colaborativa, en un contexto internacional, con el objetivo de encontrar una solución sostenible.…”

Identifying struggling teams in online challenge-based learning

“…Students' perceptions on groupwork can also be influenced by the behavior of other team members (Chang and Brickman, 2018; Pisoni and Gijlers, 2020). If a student feels that they are making valuable contributions but their team members are not, the student's perceptions of groupwork might be negatively inclined, possibly resulting in negative group experiences and low group performance.…”

“…This is because social cues are more difficult to be transmitted and interpreted online (Korkmaz and Yesil, 2011;Simon and Stauber, 2011). Lacking social presence might result in an imbalance commitment (Pisoni and Gijlers, 2020). The mentioned challenges might also affect the effectiveness of collaborative learning and students' motivation (Korkmaz and Yesil, 2011;Mayer, 2014).…”

“…Prior research emphasized the importance of early identification of collaboration patterns (Pisoni et al, 2021) and students' perceptions over individual and group contributions during groupwork (Chang and Brickman, 2018;Pisoni and Gijlers, 2020). However, little is known about students' perceptions in the online challenge-based learning (Gallagher and Savage, 2020;Koh and Hill, 2009;Leijon et al, 2021), or how students' perceptions change (Gallagher and Savage, 2020;Leijon et al, 2021).…”

Curriculum guidelines for new Fintech Master's Programmes

“…It is important in any group work students to maintain a work environment where people with different skills can perform together in harmony, communicate openly with one another, improve upon each other's ideas, prevent problems before they occur, and learn the right lessons from past projects. New online education approaches have been deployed recently to promote the development of abilities to work in teams for students, and previous research has shown that teaching innovation and entrepreneurship is rather important for this aim [7]. Another scholars employed computational approach to study the dynamics of virtual student teams by examining their Trello activity [8].…”