Teaching
Below is a brief summary of my past teaching experience, followed by my core principles that I believe help enforce learning outcomes and increase student motivation to participate in teaching activities.
Brief teaching biography
During the first year of PhD studies, I was enrolled in three courses on software project management, large-scale (waterfall) software development, and requirements engineering. These courses continued to make up my core teaching over the following five years alongside my PhD studies (although I was occasionally involved in other courses and in supervising MSc thesis projects). Initially, my main duties consisted of supervising course projects as well as facilitating labs, exercises, and seminars. Over time, I was given further responsibilities in both pedagogical development and teaching activities.
In the software project management course, I, for example, influenced how peer review of private-sector products was introduced and iteratively improved. We later wrote a pedagogical paper based on our experiences (Bjarnason and Linåker, 2016). In the revised version of the course with a broader scope on the software business, I was responsible for designing two of the six seminars and for developing and delivering two lectures on business models and software ecosystems, respectively.
In the course on requirements engineering, I was involved in the continuous improvement of the lab exercises and supervised an MSc thesis in which two students developed a new tool for requirements visualisation and prioritisation for use in the labs. I also iteratively revised the course project and introduced real-world stakeholders as product owners to ideas that the students would develop requirements specifications for. Based on the experiences, I later gave a reflective presentation summing up our lessons learned (Linåker et al., 2019). I was also responsible for developing and delivering two lectures on market-driven requirements engineering, prioritisation, and release planning, as well as requirements engineering in open source software projects.
During my two-year postdoc following my PhD studies, I took a part-time leave of absence from my main teaching activities to support an industry partner with their open source software strategy and operations. However, I continued to deliver the lectures as usual, support the requirements engineering course, and co-develop and deliver a PhD course on Design Science Research.
In the latter and current stage as a senior researcher, I continue to give guest lectures in the Requirements Engineering and Business of Software courses and, on occasion, in courses offered by the departments of Industrial Management and Technology in Society at Lund University. On a more frequent basis, I give lectures, training sessions, seminars, and workshops to practitioners, both in Sweden and internationally, at recognised venues such as the Internet Foundation’s Internet Days, the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summits, and the European Commission’s OSOR network. These focus on different aspects related to Open Source Software (OSS), Open Data, and Open Technologies in general. Public Sector Organisations (PSOs), especially at the municipal level, are a common audience I repeatedly focus on, covering topics such as public procurement of OSS, support structures for OSS, and governance and collaboration for data sharing.
Beyond oral communication and dissemination, I also share thoughts and research outputs through writing, including blog posts and more general venues. An example of the latter is an article series I co-authored with two procurement officers on public procurement of OSS. The series was published in a national procurement outlet, receiving significant attention and sparking much-needed discussion on the topic. Internally, for former and current employers, I have created, recorded, and delivered OSS training based on the internal needs of the respective organisations, in both business and science contexts.
On a more practical level, I share knowledge by supporting and facilitating public-sector and industry collaboration. For example, I have supported multiple municipalities and municipal collaborations in their evolving stages, establishing new governance structures, preparing public procurement processes, and conducting vendor dialogues. On the latter, I have also supported several vendors in exploring possibilities of leveraging OSS in their business models.
In addition, I facilitate more general networks focused on knowledge sharing. One network is NOSAD (Network Open Source and Data), which I initiated in 2019 in collaboration with two colleagues from the Swedish Public Employment Service. The network covers the Swedish national public sector and focuses on sharing knowledge on how to use and collaborate on Open Data, Open Standards, and Open Source Software. To date, we have arranged 40+ virtual and physical workshops and seminars with a still-growing community of 600+ participants. As a subset of NOSAD, I have also initiated and facilitated the Swedish OSPO network, a national network for Swedish companies and PSOs working with OSS. Here, we arrange regular physical workshops under Chatham House rules to promote a trusted environment and enable the sharing of more potentially sensitive information.
Core principles for teaching
Hands-on: Explain and contextualise theory through real-world, hands-on examples. I believe that for theoretical constructs to make sense and to stick, they need to be connected to a real-world context. Based on my own experience, as well as conversations with students, reading or hearing about a construct in an abstract, theoretical sense makes it difficult to remember and sometimes to trust the validity of the claim. Hence, I try to use real-world examples to provide context and, more specifically, to show how the theoretical construct can be instantiated in a real-world setting, thereby providing the logic and rationale that can be attached to the construct. I find this especially important for theoretical constructs that can have multiple instantiations. By providing examples from different real-world contexts and instantiations, the student can (hopefully) better understand the theoretical construct and gain multiple frames of reference for it, thereby achieving a deeper level of learning. There is, however, a fine line between providing clarity and overwhelming students with examples that might have a contrary effect on their understanding. The examples provided, therefore, need to be carefully selected and explained step by step so that they enhance the student’s understanding without making the theoretical construct ambiguous or blurry.
Realism: Provide students with as realistic settings as possible in course projects. As with contextualising theoretical constructs, I am a strong believer in providing as realistic settings as possible for students to apply the theory to practice through course projects. I believe this again helps to provide logic and rationale for the theory that the students are given. Realistic settings can further increase students’ motivation to actively participate in projects (Williams and Williams, 2011), thereby improving their engagement with and understanding of the underpinning theory of the course project. A positive side effect of providing real-world settings is that students can gain practical knowledge and soft skills (Bruegge et al., 2015), both relevant to their future professional careers.
Trust: Create and maintain trust with students through open, active dialogue. By building trust among students, they can more easily adopt and accept the knowledge being taught. The trust is based in part on my credibility as a teacher and on my “knowing what I am talking about” and in part on the character that I project. I believe that to create and maintain such trust, or Ethos, there has to be a trustworthy relationship between the students and me as a teacher.
Enthusiasm: Engage students with enthusiasm, attention and presence in the teaching. In teaching, I find that having enthusiasm and Pathos for the topic and the knowledge I, as a teacher, aim to communicate is crucial. One reason is that it can help create active awareness among students and focus their attention on the teaching activity, thereby increasing students’ motivation to attend lectures and other teaching activities. A second reason is that it can help create interest and excitement about the topic, as well as nourish critical thinking, thereby improving learning outcomes through deeper learning. I believe that, as a teacher, I need to maintain this enthusiasm in every type of teaching activity and stay 100% focused and present to maintain the connection with the students throughout the activity.
References
Bjarnason, E., & Linåker, J. (2016). Teaching Academic Writing to Large Classes of Engineering Students. Faculty of Engineering’s Conference on Pedagocal Inspiration. Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
Bruegge, B., Krusche, S., & Alperowitz, L. (2015). Software engineering project courses with industrial clients. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 15(4), 17.
Linåker, J., Bjarnason, E., & Regnell, B. (2019). Involving real-world stakeholders in course group projects: Opportunities and challenges. Lund University’s Teaching and Learning Conference. Lund, Sweden.
Williams, K. C., & Williams, C. C. (2011). Five key ingredients for improving student motivation. Research in Higher Education Journal, 12, 1.