Experiential Learning for Citizen Developers

Citizen developers and low-code platforms considerably change how software is created because the development of business applications transgresses the boundaries of organizational IT departments. With these changes, a new generation of developers must be trained. Such training is considered the responsibility of higher education institutions that enthusiastically adopt practice-based and experiential learning approaches. At the core, the focus is on real-world experiences and practical problem-solving, albeit with growing concerns about limiting deep learning and metacognitive reflections. Ample educational research highlights that metacognition is essential for students to be workplace-ready, but very little research has investigated the impact of practice-based learning on metacognitive reflections. This study draws on experiential learning theory to examine the influence of experiences in a low-code systems development project on metacognitive thinking. In a quantitative study using a survey, the effects of experiential learning factors (i.e., authenticity, active learning, self-relevance, and utility) and a team-based learning factor on metacognitive reflections are tested. Results show that when citizen developers create business applications, the experiential learning factors positively impact metacognitive reflections. However, team-based learning only positively moderates the relationship between self-relevance and reflections, whereas it negatively moderates the relationship between authenticity and reflections. Taken as a whole, the study's contributions suggest that practice-based learning using low-code platforms under the citizen developer method is an effective way to train IT talents with needed context and life-long self-learning skills.