Service Learning in Application Development Course: A Case Study of a Rural Community Engagement

Service learning aims to expose students mainly at tertiary studies to engage with the local communities under the selected registered courses. It enables students to apply the assigned projects at the chosen community. Thus, they can learn and solve real problems. This paper reports the service-learning component that is integrated with a four-credit Application Development course for the third-year students of Semester 1, Session 2019/2020 under Bachelor of Computer Science (Software Engineering) programme at School of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The students were attached to a rural community project known as Centre for Advancement in Rural Education Informatics (iCARE) during the one-semester study. The students were assigned to solve the issues in mastering English among rural learners by developing either a mobile application or an augmented reality application in a team of three students. The materials were provided by the English teacher who acts as the key stakeholder to represent the rural schools in Southeast Johor region under the Southeast Johor Development Authority (KEJORA). The study shows good impacts among both the university students and the rural students selected under the study.