| An Assessment of the Effectiveness of an Integrated Outcome-based Curriculum for Developing Research and Project Skills in Computing |
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| Abstract While project-based learning (PBL) is an established teaching method to cultivate engineering students, many students have encountered difficulties. This is particularly serious in the Final Year Project commonly found in the last year of study of undergraduate degrees. To better prepare our students to take up the FYP challenge, the Computing programme of Macao Polytechnic Institute has implemented an integrated outcome–based curriculum for developing research and project skills. In this paper, we evaluated the effective of this curriculum using a semi-structured exit interview. Two major research questions are (1) what were the challenges that the recent cohort had actually encountered? (2) What are the factors contributing to the effectiveness of this curriculum? Using stratified sampling, 12 out of 46 students were invited to participate and a thematic analysis was made on the interview transcript. The findings show that the curriculum has supported the students the most in technical reading and writing. The FYP has also strengthened the technical knowledge acquired in previous courses. However, more efforts are required to improve students’ self-study and time management skills. |
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