Improving the introduction to a collaborative project-based course on computer network applications

Abstract

In engineering studies, there is a shift to new teaching methodologies with focus on the student involvement, like project-based learning. Project-based learning courses, however, often relay on a previous course where the technical background to be used in the projects is taught, requiring this way two terms for an area. In this paper, we consider a project-based course on computer network applications, which has been designed to cover both the technical and non-technical content in only one term. In the three years we have been teaching this course, our observation based on questionnaires is that the organization of the course allows to successfully reaching the course objectives. We feel, however, that we do not fully exploit the learning potential the course could have in the first few weeks of the course. We describe how the course is organized and the problems we have identified. We propose a project demonstration tool and describe how our solution improves towards our goals. With the proposed tool, the students should better obtain already in the very first days of the course a clear vision about the projects, allowing fully taking advantage of the opportunities which the course offers. format. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.