A Practical Evaluation of a Collaborative Learning Method for Engineering Project Subjects

Abstract

The new training plans of the European Higher Education Area recommend the implementation of new teaching methods, which poses new challenges. Different teaching methods have produced successful results by applying collaborative methodologies. This paper evaluates adapting a collaborative methodology for engineering project subjects at a university school of engineering. A statistical analysis that employs a multifactor analysis of variance was performed to identify the factors that influence the success of implementing this approach in engineering project subjects. The results indicate that the size of the group is the most influential factor in implementing a collaborative methodology. With an analytic hierarchy process, a value function was defined to compare the behavior of the proposed collaborative methodology with the behaviors of other methodologies. Using this value function, the results of the proposed collaborative methodology were compared with those of lectures. Relating the comparison criteria to the skills that are acquired by the project subjects, better results are observed with the collaborative methodology.

Keywords

• Collaborative work
• decision making
• engineering education
• industrial engineering
• project engineering