Software engineering teacher networks in Finland - what motivates teachers to collaborate?

Abstract

Teaching collaboration between universities is becoming increasingly important. Student intakes are increasing, and students are including MOOC courses from other universities to their studies. In Finland, there has been a long tradition in national teaching collaboration in computing education field. Our main research question is what motivates software engineering teachers to collaborate among universities. In this paper, we first give a short overview of national teaching collaboration from 1990’s to the present day. Then, we present findings from a questionnaire that had respondents from active network participants. Main factors and practices that motivated teachers to participate in networking activities were existing project funding, active leaders and enough participants, interesting topics such as new innovations in learning technology, regular meetings and remote participation.