An analysis of student app ideas for improving university education

Abstract

In the course TDT4140 Software Engineering at NTNU in 2017 students worked in groups of 4 to propose ideas and make limited prototypes for software apps that could revolutionize university education. This paper analyses what kind of apps the students proposed, and what this may tell us about the student view of shortcomings in current university education. The main findings are that the students' ideas mainly gathered on a few types of apps: calendar and progress tracking (e.g., keeping track of lecture and seminar times, exercise deadlines, etc.), Q&A / discussion forums, lecture interaction apps, and quiz apps either for the teacher to test students or for student self-testing. The analysis indicates that many students see lack of student-teacher interaction as an important challenge. Somewhat related, many students are uncertain of their progress during the semester and want more frequent feedback. Technology is seen as a possible enabler for solving both these challenges. Towards the end, the paper also speculates how the project might have been done differently if it had been important that the students come up with more revolutionary ideas, as the resulting ideas in this project were mainly for incremental improvements of existing ways of education.