Eberly Center

Online Mob Programming: A Collaborative Project-Based Learning Intervention

Sankaranarayanan, S., Dashti, C., An, M., Wang, X., Rosé, C., Sakr, M., & M. Hilton

We will present the lessons we have learned from implementing a new pedagogical approach for collaborative project-based learning called Online Mob Programming (OMP) in a 6-week free online course on Cloud Computing offered to working IT professionals. The industrial practice of Mob Programming, where groups of developers work on the same problem face-to-face, with a regimen of shifting roles that encourage interdependence, was adapted for online course use wherein a group of 4-6 students collaborate through a structured process for solving programming tasks. Students participated in four intelligent conversational agent-coordinated OMP sessions where code and chat data was collected. In combination with qualitative data from questionnaires, we show evidence of students following the structure of the task and disentangle differences in behavior based on group size, task difficulty, and task outcome. We are iterating on our implementation of OMP in a Cloud Computing course offered to CMU students this Fall.

Sreecharan Sankaranarayanan, Language Technologies Institute SCS

Cameron Dashti, Computer Science Department SCS

Marshall An, Computer Science Department SCS

Xu Wang, Human Computer Interaction Institute SCS

Carolyn Rosé, Language Technologies Institute SCS

Majd Sakr, Language Technologies Institute SCS

Michael Hilton, Institute for Software Research SCS