APACHES: Human-Centered and Project-Based Methods in Higher Education

Abstract

Human-centered project-based teaching methods have proved their efficiency and popularity in the last decade. Such practice emphasizes the existence of interdisciplinary skills that students manipulate and incrementally learn to master throughout their higher education curriculum. This paper addresses some questions around the integration and evaluation of interdisciplinary skills. The first question focuses on the establishment of a skill-based approach to keep track of the students’ competencies over human-centered computing skills all along their curriculum. To this end, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of existing approaches in the context of agile practices and interdisciplinary skills in human-centered project-based teaching methods. The second question deals with the tools that can accompany such approach and how they can affect the teaching courses, the university instructors’ habits and the motivation of the students. A semi-structured interviews were conducted with five instructors regarding these two questions. One main conclusion is the need to keep track of the students progress during the courses to help an efficient follow up. For this end, we propose to co-design a framework named APACHES.