Student Feedback for Globally Distributed Team Application Development

This Research Work-in-Progress Paper presents an evaluation of feedback gathered from a post-semester survey jointly taken by students in Ireland and the United States. The ability to function in international team-based environments becomes increasingly important and represents a desirable skill for employers of graduating students. Despite incentives, an international course offering in mobile application development resulted in only two cross-institutional teams by student choice, which we investigate here.We encountered that about half of the respondents considered dropping the course for at least one reason at one point, with one third identifying the course difficulty level as a reason, but also indicating agreement with the course being worthwhile. Some of the feedback presented indicates that students have a preference for project-based courses and like working in teams, but are also wary of the potential coordination overheads and dependability on their peers, despite modern communication tools as part of the class offering.