Bilateral Benefits of Service-Learning

CIS students meet with Chaparral teachers to discuss design requirements for the classroom web portals

CIS students Ranis Makadia and Mike Burton gather web portal requirements from their community partners – Mrs. Maciariello (1st grade teacher) and Mrs. Harrison (2nd grade teacher).

Larisa Preiser, a professor of Computer Information Systems, leverages her academic and consulting expertise in systems development (PhD, CGU) to connect the academy to community through service-learning projects in web development. Over the past two years, Dr. Preiser’s service-learning students in Interactive Web Development  course (CIS311) collaborated with the K-6 teachers of Chaparral Elementary school to plan, design, and implement web portals for the teachers’ classrooms. The students also trained teachers to use Contribute software to maintain the content and structure of their portals.

As the result of this academic-community partnership, all thirty of Chaparral teachers now have customized classroom portals with grade-level digital resources for students and student families. The teachers keep their portals up-to-date with the Contribute software  (http://tweek.cusd.claremont.edu/chaparral/teachers/). “Cal Poly’s service-learning projects in web development help bridge the gap between academia and our local educational community,” says Dr. Preiser. “The bilateral value of such projects is that our students benefit greatly from experiential educational, while the community partners get very unique web portal sites for teaching and learning, the sites that they would have neither the time nor the technical expertise to develop on their own.”  

Project Management Effective project management is critical to the success of a service-learning project. Managing a S-L project entails planning, organizing, facilitating, and overseeing all aspects of the project from its inception to completion. The following list summarizes the essential project management activities for an 11-week service-learning project: 1) Pre-Planning Meeting -- before the quarter beings, the faculty member meets with the community partners to plan the project and to sign the paperwork    2) Week 2 –Introductory Meeting -- students meet their community partners at the partner’s site to exchange contact information, and to set up meeting dates    3) Week 4 – Requirements Gathering --student-partner teams meet to discuss partners’ needs for a classroom web portal    4) Weeks 5&7 – Prototype Presentations --student-partner teams meet to review web portal prototypes    5) Week 9 – Partner Training --students train the community partners to maintain their classroom web portals    6) Week 10 – Final Presentations --students unveil the completed web portals to the community partners during the final presentation at the partners’ site    7) Weeks 11 – Project Implementation --students upload web portals to the community partners’ school server and turn in the web portal documentation to the partners

Students enrolled in the service-learning sections of CIS311 learn about the process of web development and client training in real-life context, thus gaining valuable subject-related knowledge, critical-thinking skills, and interpersonal competencies. “The most important benefit of this course was being able to directly apply what is learned in class to real world,” said one student. Another student added, “Developing a web site for a real client was far more challenging than doing exercises out of the book. The client’s expectations added a lot of pressure and motivation for me to study more because I needed to develop a well-made finished product instead of an average web site that I probably would have been satisfied with.”

The community partners (i.e., elementary school teachers, their students, and student families) also benefit greatly from the CIS311 S-L projects. Such projects help facilitate social change and empower the elementary school communities to integrate technology into the curriculum-based activities of their classrooms. “Our classroom portal offers opportunities for students to extend their own learning beyond the traditional school day and choose for themselves whether and how they want to extend that learning,” says Ms. Russell, a second-grade Chaparral teacher. “Among the important benefits of having a classroom portal is to keep the parents posted on what is going on in the classroom. For working parents who are not able to volunteer in their child’s class, the portal makes us feel more connected to the classroom activities and to the education of our children as it unfolds in real-time,” says a parent of a Chaparral student. “I visit our class website often because it has fun games, and you learn a lot about math, reading, and science,” adds a third-grade student of the Chaparral Elementary.