The use of blogs in a project-based learning context for first-year engineering students’ teams

Abstract

The Integrated Project of Industrial Engineering and Management 1 (IPIEM1) is a curricular unit of the first year developed in the first semester of the Integrated Masters degree of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM11) - University of Minho, Portugal. In the 2019 s 1st semester and in the IPIEM1 previous versions, Project-Based Learning (PBL) was usually adopted as a learning methodology. In this pedagogical development context, freshman students develop a project integrating all five courses related to this current semester. To undertake this project, the students work in large teams that comprise nine to ten members. Throughout the semester, each team must accomplish the project phases and tasks. To communicate their progress and results developed during the semester, each team designed a blog. In the IPIEM1 previous editions of PBL of this year in this program, the weblog (blog) digital technology was also adopted, but it was never assessed. Thus, this paper has two main objectives: 1) to evaluate the importance of the blog for the teams; 2) to discuss teams engagement during its development, knowing that it would be a part of the assessment method. The survey results revealed that the teams considered the blog useful to keep an update record of the project progress and to stimulate the writing and reflection about project contents. Furthermore, some of teachers and students considerations showed the need for providing more training and experience in the development of blogs.