Abstract: Capstones form an important part of the curriculum in many undergraduate and graduate pro-grams in Information Systems. These projects give the students a chance to synthesize and apply the skills they have been acquiring throughout their academic program. These projects can be integrated with another recent initiative in higher education: service learning. By turning the capstones into “real-world” projects for external clients, the students can give back to the community while completing a valuable learning experience. However, these real world exercises sometimes take on real world characteristics – like failure. How do we, as professors, guide students through a service learning capstone to completion, despite the external challenges that come with it? How can we evaluate the outcome of these projects, when we know success may not be a part of the final product? The authors draw on personal experience with service learning capstones to address this problem.

Keywords: Capstone Course, service learning, student learning, facilitation

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Recommended Citation: Reinicke, B., Janicki, T. (2011). Real World Projects, Real World Problems: Capstones for External Clients . Information Systems Education Journal, 9(3) pp 23-27. http://isedj.org/2011-9/ ISSN: 1545-679X. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of ISECON 2010)