Objectives: The objective was to clarify how agile project working online and onsite affect students’ innovation skills especially in the area of teamwork.

The students learn basics of project management with agile method (Scrum) by working in 3-6 students project teams. During the projects each team build web sites for fictive companies and used various online tools for communication.  Microsoft Teams was the main communication tool during the projects but other online tools such as Trello (trello.com ) for follow-up of tasks and Git (github.com) for version control were also used. Students worked both onsite and online during the projects. Projects’ follow-up was arranged onsite by means of Sprint Planning and Review meetings based on Scrum principles.

Projects have four one-week duration Sprints, where for each projects selected topics (user stories) for development in Sprint Planning meetings. Project requirements in terms of user stories were maintained in the Trello tool, where each project has its own Trello board. At the end of the Sprint students demonstrated the results to teachers that acted as customers or in Scrum terms Product Owners that approved the user stories done or not.

Projects were asked to communicate in Teams where all the projects had own channels. All the project documentation, reporting was available in the project’s channel in Teams. For each Sprint each project had Scrum Master (i.e. some kind of team leader) that ensured that project followed Scrum principles. Scrum Master also worked with development of project’s results. During Sprints, the projects also had their internal follow-up meeting (Daily Scrum) to verify the status of tasks everyone is doing for Sprint.

To measure the effect of online and onsite working for projects, SINCOE@Assessment Tool based survey created using MS Forms was used. Members in project teams conducted the survey before and after the project work to clarify possible effects of online and onsite working for innovation skills.

Methods:

Usage of SINCOE@Assessment tool

Students evaluated their levels in the following topics: ‘teamwork’, ‘networking’, ‘initiative’, ‘creativity’ and ‘critical thinking’ using the scale: “Strongly agree (5)”, “Somewhat agree (4)”, “Neither agree or disagree (3)”, “Somewhat disagree (2)”, “Strongly disagree (1)” and “I don’t know”. The survey before the project was answered by 58 students and the survey after the project 43 students and results were compared for students that answered in both questionaries and for the students that really participated in the project work.

Additionally, the questionary after the project work included “arrange in order” type questions for topics ‘Teamwork’ and ‘Networking’ in order to find what topics affected mostly positively to them.

Environment:

Project teams worked in MS Teams where all the projects had own Teams channels. All the project documentation, reporting was done in the project’s channel in Teams. Additionally, Trello was used to control project requirements with Product Owner and Git to control versions of project deliverables (software).

MS Forms was used as the tool to create the questionnaire based on SINCOE@Assessment Tool.

Role:

Teacher acts as Product Owner and takes care of coaching of Scrum method for projects. The teacher also arranges the MS Forms based questionnaires before and after project work. Students’ responsibility was to complete projects according to Scrum principles and use various tools such as Teams during project work.

Motivation:

For online tools, students seem to favor tools that they use to use. For instance, these students prefer to use Discord as it is the tool students used when they started to study at school.

However, school’s official communication tools such as Teams, should be promoted more to get those widely used and accepted by students.

Assessment

Working at school was found to be the most effective way to improve teamworking. For networking, teachers’ support ranked highest, but also communication in Teams channel and support received from expert team were found to be valuable. Summary of the effects is described in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Development of Innovations Skills based on SINCOE@Assessment Tool

Even though teamwork was not improved, the second survey contained questions about what things affected positively to teamworking. Students were asked to arrange in order predefined topics where the results can be found in Figure 2. Working onsite at school was ranked as the most important thing. Concerning the online tools students used, working with other online tools (e.g. Discord) was mentioned more often in 1st, 2nd or 3rd position compared to the tools students were asked to work with (Teams, Trello and Git). The reason might be the fact that students by themselves had selected Discord for their main online communication channel for studies.

Figure 2. Activities affecting positively to teamwork

Similarly, students were asked to rank topics affecting positively to networking and where the communication took place with stakeholders (Figure 3). Support onsite at school seems to be more beneficial, but usage of Teams for project communication is also high in the ranking.

Figure 3. Tools and practices affecting positively to networking