Tove Attoff and Isak Engvall
The 10th of January 2011 the Royal Institute of Technology launched a new communication channel through their website for teachers and students (RCN, 2011a). According to Ragnar Pihlström (2011), technical project manager for KTH Social, the new feature is meant to enable easy access to information regarding courses by correlating the information. The students would be able to reach teachers with questions and query. The school is constantly working to achieve the goal to gather all the information in one place and consequently even laboratory assistance in various subjects and courses should be included.
The purpose of this graduation project was to find out if the Royal Institute of Technology’s new communication channel, KTH Social, could be used for guidance with programming exercises in the course DD1311 Programmeringsteknik med PBL. To achieve our goals we examined existing channels of communication observing how these are used for advice and guidance in technical courses, as well as a technique called blended learning where students are taught online as a complement to the campus-based methods.
During the project we used both qualitative and high quantity methods. We chose an interview, a questionnaire and two focus groups.
The results showed that there is a need for guidance through KTH Social and that it ought to be a complement to existing traditional tutoring. The present structure and layout of KTH Social should be developed to be able to meet the demand in a satisfying way. The best communication channel for guidance with laboratory programming was discussion board, even instant messaging was interesting for the purpose.
The results also showed that the motivation for students to use the communication channel for guidance with laboratory programming depends on the easiness to use the channel, it must be consequent, general, clear, and the questions ought to be answered quickly.