Enriching Capstone Project-Based Learning Experiences Using a Crowdsourcing Recommender Engine

Abstract

Capstone project-based learning courses generate a suitable space where students can put into action knowledge specific to an area. In the case of Software Engineering (SE), students must apply knowledge at the level of Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Management of Software Projects. There is a large number of supportive resources for SE that one can find on the web, however, information overload ends up saturating the students who wish to find resources more accurate depending on their needs. This is why we propose a crowdsourcing recommender engine as part of an educational software platform. This engine based its recommendations on content from StackExchange posts using the project's profile in which a student is currently working. To generate the project's profile, our engine takes advantage of the information stored by students in the aforementioned platform. Content-based algorithms based on Okapi BM25 and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are used to provide suitable recommendations. The evaluation of the engine was held with students from the capstone course in SE of the University Catholic of Chile. Results show that Cosine similarity over traditional bag-of-words TF-IDF content vectors yield interesting results, but they are outperformed by the integration of BM25 with LDA.