Addressing challenges of hybrid capstone projects in a pandemic environment

Capstone courses are a common way to bring together earlier learnings into a practical demon stration of the skills acquired. At Åbo Akademi University, our Capstone course, or Project Course, has been running as a very practical, handson course, emphasizing the physical presence and interaction among students. The Covid19 pandemic made it impossible to run the
course in the standard way affecting the main course objectives. This article discusses the challenges and solutions of running the course in both hybrid and online format, and what learning can be drawn from this. The different tools and methods used for forming the teams and formulating the projects are analysed and evaluated, both through a student survey and using the lecturer’s qualitative hindsight. We show that by using proper tools and methods we can compensate for the drawbacks and limitations of a Pandemic environment.