Exploring the use of a mobile application designed for capstone projects for Hong Kong tertiary students

Abstract

The capstone project (CP) or its equivalent, as the most demanding assignment in undergraduate programmes, requires students to showcase the knowledge and skills they have developed during their studies. To produce a good quality CP, students need to attend to both the content and the presentation, the latter of which includes their ability to effectively and appropriately use the target language. This is challenging in the context of Hong Kong’s tertiary education for two reasons. Almost all universities mandate that CPs be written completely in English, although English is not the mother tongue of most students. Further, there is a lack of curriculum space in the final year of the undergraduate program to offer targeted English language courses for helping students complete their CP. During the first months of the COVID19 pandemic, the situation was further exacerbated by the inability of students to meet their supervisors in person to discuss the writing and progress of their final-year project. To address the CP language needs, a team of teachers and technical staff from five universities developed an in-house mobile app that offers discipline-specific support to final-year undergraduate students focusing on the English they needed to deliver their capstone project. The app offered three major functions: the learning tool, as the main function, provided discipline-specific English language learning tips; and two other functions provided opportunities for students to self-manage their project and communicate more efficiently with their supervisors. This article presents the findings from an exploratory case study using data collected from two groups of students, one group before the COVID pandemic and the other during COVID, and examines students’ use of the app and their perceptions of it especially when the pandemic prevented face-to-face learning on campus.