Cooperative Learning and Soft Skills Training in an IT Course

Pedagogy of higher education is shifting from passive to active and deep learning. At the same time, the information technology (IT) industry and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) are demanding soft skills training. Thus, in designing an IT course, we devised group teaching projects where students learn to work with peers in a constructive and cooperative manner as they achieve deep learning by fulfilling their teaching responsibilities. The collective student effort provided the amount of tutoring required to cover JSP, PHP, Ajax, XML, HTML5, and RSS, which would be impossible for one instructor. While the group project provides excellent opportunities for soft skills training and deep learning, its practical realization is difficult to assess. Group activities often take place outside of the classroom, and instructors are kept out of communication and interaction loops. This may lead to a free-rider problem where some students are awarded the same grades as others who contribute more than their fair share of the work. To address this problem, we designed and administered two peer assessment tools. This paper reports the students' response to the course design and shares two soft skills assessment tools with IT educators in an effort to meet the demands of the IT industry and ABET. The study should prove especially valuable to those who teach in the fast advancing field of web technologies. (Contains 3 figures and 4 tables.)