User Requirement Analysis for an Online Collaboration Tool for Senior Industrial Engineering Design Course

Abstract

Many undergraduate industrial engineering programs offer a capstone senior design course that gives students an opportunity to apply the knowledge gained through their coursework to real-world projects. In this article, we present the results of a user requirements analysis of online collaboration tools containing Web 2.0 features for teaching such courses. A structured focus group analysis was conducted in which subjects evaluated several Web 2.0 features implemented using HUBzero in a prototype online collaboration tool. Our subjects included undergraduate students, faculty members, teaching assistants, and company representatives who had recently participated in an industrial engineering senior design course. On the basis of the responses of the 40 subjects, we identified desirable features for online collaboration tools to be used when teaching capstone senior design courses. A follow-up supplementary survey of 108 students currently enrolled in an industrial engineering senior design course offered at Purdue University revealed results consistent with the findings of the focus group study. Features found to be particularly important components of such a collaboration tool included file sharing, the ability to form user groups, provision of online comments and feedback, easy organization of content, and communication methods for remote collaboration. The usability of the tool was also rated as being very important. C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Using wikis to investigate communication, collaboration and engagement in Capstone engineering design projects

“…This information is useful to carry out early interventions to keep the students on track. For these reasons, the authors wished to investigate whether encouraging the feedback, easy organisation of content and setup and communication methods for remote collaboration (Nanda, Lehto, and Nof 2014). A comparison table of the possibilities considered in this work is given in Table 1.…”