The Case of the Fragmented Classroom

Abstract

Increasingly, education is offered to students any time, anywhere, for any stage of life, for students with any background and a wide variety of goals. This implies it is taken at different times, in different places, at different paces, by students with different technical backgrounds who are on different pathways. Students are becoming ever more isolated except for the teaching and technology that connects them. In our software development teaching, we find this combines with differences in technology choice and technical environment between students to produce classes filled with groups of students who face very different challenges. Course design, then, increasingly has to take account of the different forms of variation within the class, so that it can not only cope with them but turn them to an advantage of diversity. Some of these differences, such as the particular degree path by which a student reached the subject, are not refined questions of the student as an individual, but coarse differences imposed by external constraints (such as their differing degree rules or the location they are studying from). As these differences are external to the student, I refer to them in the paper as fragmentation rather than variation. This paper is a case study of software development teaching at a regional Australian university, identifying the kinds of fragmentation within it, and the various strategies (including the mundane) we have used to turn it to an advantage.