How IE Business School activated collaborative learning between coding students

Learning objectives

• Develop and apply strong programming practices and problem-solving skills
• Demonstrate fluency with command-line interface (CLI) commands
• Collaborate effectively to solve coding problems and explain solutions
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Learning activities

• Before class: Students engage with annotated lecture materials via Interactive Document, responding to embedded questions and raising their own. This pre-class engagement primes them for deeper discussion and application.
• During class: Students work through programming labs and CLI exercises individually and in small groups. FeedbackFruits’ collaborative features allow them to build on each other's questions and clarifications in real time.
• Outside class: Students continue coding assignments independently, encouraged to revisit the interactive study materials as needed.
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These learning activities address the following levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy:

• Remember: Recalling programming syntax and best practices
• Apply: Executing coding and command-line exercises
• Create: Designing software and visualizing it using UML diagrams

• In order to assess whether students understand the coding principles an individual assignment and exam is graded by the instructor. The FeedbackFruits activity is not graded as it is only set up to flip the classroom.
• Class participation is evaluated based on the quality (not quantity) of participation in class.
• The instructor was able to evaluate the level of interactivity and collaboration by reviewing the comments and questions raised in the Interactive Document.

• Students were more engaged compared to prior years, the formative activity had a 100% participation rate.
• Students enjoyed working with the Interactive Document and would like to see the application in other courses as well.
• It was accepted that the instructor did not have time to answer all the questions in the document. Fortunately, the students helped each other out by themselves.
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"Students were not explicitly encouraged to reply and help each other out in the learning process, but fortunately this happened organically." - Instructor

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The role of the instructor

• Creating inline exercises in the Interactive Document.
• Checking the analytics table to evaluate students’ progress and specifically whether students worked together (commented on each other).
• The most important factor is to give clear instructions of what is expected from the students.
• Next to that, it is important to make online interactions safe and encouraging – ask for constructive peer feedback only and remind them there is no such thing as stupid questions.
• The instructor has the ability to clarify instructions that are not clear by annotating and commenting.
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Added value of the technology

FeedbackFruits supported a pedagogically grounded learning design of the course that:

• Encouraged active learning before class, allowing for richer in-class practice
• Facilitated peer-supported problem-solving in a subject typically characterized by individual work
• Enabled real-time insight into student thinking, helping the instructor adjust the course as needed
• Provided a low-barrier way to implement flipped learning and collaborative dialogue, without requiring complex new tools

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