IT Students Project Group Work in the Day of COVID-19: Understanding the Impact and Attitudes

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in disruptive impacts on teaching and learning experience around the world. In a particular context of project-based courses, where students need to interact and collaborate frequently, there appears additional challenges in implementing and learning from projects. Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on project-based courses does not only provide recommendations for preparing such courses in post-pandemic eras, but also has some implications for physical IT projects in industry. We investigated 30 student teams in Spring semester 2020, when COVID-19 measures were applied in the middle of the course. We adopted a mixed-method approach; a bottom-up analysis with a thematic analysis, and a top-down approach with attribution theory. We found that COVID19 measures introduced as external attributions to the course had direct and sudden impact manifestations on individual level, which leads to internal attributions, such as lack of motivation, lack of commitment, realization of usefulness of some online tools, and mental struggle. This creates an indirect impact on team, process and product factors in the course.