Keynotes and Speakers for ITx 2018
Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology
Tony Clear is an Associate Professor at Auckland University of Technology. His research interests are in Global Software Engineering, Collaborative Computing, Global Virtual Teams, and Computer Science Education Research.
He holds positions as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), Computer Science Education and ACM Inroads for which he is also a regular columnist.
Information Technology industry employers consistently stress the need for graduates to have the ability to work effectively in teams.
However, most computing curricula places emphasis on a student’s own work. Graduate attributes stress the need for students to have good teamwork and communication skills.
Group work/teamwork is one way that academic programmes aim to develop these capabilities. However choosing, mentoring and assessing groups poses challenges in an often artificial academic setting.
This panel presents options and strategies for choosing groups, monitoring their progress to achieve successful outcomes and the complex issue of assessment of not only the group process and outcomes but also the individual student performance.
In industry IT professionals don’t always get the opportunity to choose who is in their team for any given project, the panel will present different options for choosing student teams to achieve the desired results. It is important to keep the groups focussed and cohesive in working towards their outcomes, approaches to conducting mid-project process reviews.
Individual and group assessment will be identified to ensure groups are assessed fairly while also recognising individual achievement.