Learning teamwork skills in university programming courses Pilar Sancho-Thomas, Rubén Fuentes-Fernández * , Baltasar Fernández-Manjón Dpto. Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense, 28040 Madrid, Spain article info Article history: Received 14 December 2008 Received in revised form 16 March 2009 Accepted 17 March 2009 Keywords: Cooperative/collaborative learning Learning communities Post-secondary education Teaching/learning strategies abstract University courses about computer programming usually seek to provide students not only with technical knowledge, but also with the skills required to work in real-life software projects. Nowadays, the devel- opment of software applications requires the coordinated efforts of the members of one or more teams. Therefore, it is important for software professionals to master the sort of skills that assure the success of teamwork, such as communication, leadership, negotiation, or team management. However, these abil- ities are difficult to teach, one of the reasons being that they require true commitment from the students. However, today students are taking a more and more passive role in their own education, two of the more evident consequences being the increase in dropout rates and the decrease in marks obtained in exams. The NUCLEO e-learning framework has been designed to promote the effective acquisition of teamwork skills and, at the same time, to promote the more active participation of the students in their own learning process. NUCLEO adopts a socio-constructivist pedagogical approach that pursues the development of communities of practice for Problem Based Learning. Our research has rooted the design decisions of NUCLEO in the analysis of its socio-cultural environment with Activity Theory, which considers conflicts within groups as the impetus of their evolution and the forges of their environments. This paper presents the analysis of the main features of NUCLEO according to Activity Theory, as well as the experimental results obtained with the framework in three different case studies in university courses. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Teams are the basis for the organization of software development today, since the increasing complexity of projects has made them unachievable for individuals. Development teams commonly distribute the work among their members by following well-defined struc- tures of interdependent responsibilities, with typical roles like designers, testers, architects or project managers (Benarek, Zuser, & Grech- enig, 2005). In this setting, professionals are not only required to have state-of-the-art knowledge and technical abilities, but also to be able to cooperate successfully inside teams. Effective teamwork requires mastering specific abilities, such as leadership, coordination and con- flict management. This implies that if higher education wants to meet the requirements of the students’ future professional lives, it has to address the acquisition of such soft skills and has to have the technology to support them (Rugarcia, Felder, Woods, & Stice, 2000). However, traditional courses do not seem to succeed in helping students to acquire this sort of skills (Wilhelm, Logan, Smith, & Szul, 2002). Most of them are mainly focused on teaching technical contents and they are usually organized according to teacher-centred ap- proaches where the teacher plays the role of information dispenser while the students act as passive receptacles. In this context, students need only to listen, take notes and study for exams. Though this situation is starting to change (Howell, Williams, & Lindsay, 2003) and many teachers are increasingly demanding that their students work in group assignments, this so-called group work is strongly focused on obtaining an outcome. Therefore, how the group has managed its achievement is not significant (Johnston & Miles, 2004), which leads to organizing the teamwork towards minimizing the effort expended in order to obtain the result. Students work individually and they only get together to integrate the outcome, thus reducing the peer-to-peer interaction to the minimum extent (Vik, 2001). The progressive adoption in higher education of blended learning approaches that manage their distant interactions through Learning Management Systems (LMS) has not been of much help. Without proper guidance, the LMS increases the decoupling of members and tasks even further. This overall virtual organization may improve students’ use of time, but it also reduces the social interchange that could re- quire the use of soft skills (Oren, Mioduser, & Nachmias, 2002; Robey, Khoo, & Powers, 2000). 0360-1315/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.03.010 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 913947548; fax: +34 913947547. E-mail addresses: pilar@sip.ucm.es (P. Sancho-Thomas), ruben@fdi.ucm.es (R. Fuentes-Fernández), balta@fdi.ucm.es (B. Fernández-Manjón). Computers & Education 53 (2009) 517–531 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers & Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu