Sustainable Project-Based Learning Methodology Adaptable to Technological Advances for Web Programming

Juan Carlos López-Pimentel,Alejandro Medina-Santiago,Miguel Alcaraz-Rivera,Carolina Del-Valle-Soto

doi:10.3390/su13158482

Juan Carlos López-Pimentel, Alejandro Medina-Santiago + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158482

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Abstract

The fast pace of development of the Internet and the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic have considerably impacted the educative sector, encouraging the constant transformation of the teaching/learning strategies and more in technological areas as Educational Software Engineering. Web programming, a fundamental topic in Software Engineering and Cloud-based applications, deals with various critical challenges in education, such as learning continuous emerging technological tools, plagiarism detection, generating innovative learning environments, among others. Continual change and even more change with the current digitization becomes a challenge for teachers and students who cannot depend on traditional educational methods. The article presents a sustainable teaching/learning methodology for web programming courses in Engineering Education using project-based learning adaptable to the continuous web technological advances. The methodology has been developed and improved during 9 years, 15 groups, and 3 different universities. Our results demonstrate that the methodology is adaptable with new technologies that might arise; it also presents the advantages of avoiding plagiarism in students and a personalized induction for every specific student in the learning process.

Highlights

The Internet has revolutionized the way in which information systems are conceived, and the Web has become the framework to publish and consume all types of multimedia contents and resources [1]
We have found that the familiarity of the students with the operating systems’ design given by everyday use of computers was an advantage, as the students could focus their efforts on the Web Programming concepts and it did not add a layer of cumbersome extra challenges to the task, so the students could focus on learning web development
From the results shown in the table we conclude that the students felt overwhelmed, they were left with a lot of positive opinions, including: the project was good intellectual challenge, it helps to strengthen their Web knowledge, and that it was a good self-learning strategy

Summary

Introduction

The Internet has revolutionized the way in which information systems are conceived, and the Web has become the framework to publish and consume all types of multimedia contents and resources [1]. There is a problem when these activities become classical: many solutions might be found on the Web. The existence and availability of these public solutions are a real challenge for teachers who want to reuse these specific learning materials, since valuable extra class time devoted to studying activities could end up as a mere copying exercise of someone else’s work. The existence and availability of these public solutions are a real challenge for teachers who want to reuse these specific learning materials, since valuable extra class time devoted to studying activities could end up as a mere copying exercise of someone else’s work Rehashing these activities will leave the teacher with no certainty that the students have learned their subjects. The current communication technologies bring new risks and forms of non-ethical behavior that sometimes are not easy to detect [3]

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