Delivering Round-the-Clock Help to Software Engineering Students Using Discord: An Experience Report

ABSTRACTThis experience report describes the delivery of round-the-clock help to students using Discord (a popular messaging and voice/video calling platform) in a remote software engineering course. Students in the course learn full-stack web development using Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, and work in teams to develop web applications. Our central goal in offering round-the-clock help using Discord was to increase the amount of help that students receive from teachers (i.e., teaching assistants and the instructor). Indeed, we found that our 24/7-Discord approach led to a considerable increase in the amount of student-teacher interaction versus the approach used previously, which emphasized in-person office hours and a question-and-answer forum in Piazza. Moreover, students from underrepresented groups in computer science interacted with teachers at a rate comparable to other students, and we received consistently positive feedback from students regarding the approach. We also made several key observations about when students tended to seek help, including that they sought help the most between 7:00 p.m. and midnight, that help seeking spiked right before deadlines, that students posted the fewest help messages on weekends, and that students posted significantly more messages during the first half of the course, which emphasized skills assignments, versus the second half, which focused on team project work.