Projects as an Active Learning Strategy: A Look at Public Institutions in Minas Gerais
Keywords:
Active Learning Strategies. Engineering Education. Innovation in Engineering Education.Abstract
In engineering programs, projects have been adopted in various ways as a strategy for active learning (AL). Projects can vary in aspects such as duration, team size, complexity of the driving question, degree of interdisciplinarity, and level of institutional integration. Although widely discussed in the literature and among faculty, this article presents how projects have been implemented in public institutions in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The study is part of the second phase of the Research Project of the Observatory of Innovations in Engineering Education, funded by the Research Support Foundation of the State of Minas Gerais (FAPEMIG). In the first phase, 219 engineering programs offered by public institutions in the state were analyzed, revealing that 45% of the terms mentioned were related to project-based AL strategies. For this reason, the present article investigates how projects are implemented in these contexts. In this stage of the research, 403 project-related terms were identified out of a total of 1,315 general AL terms extracted from institutional documents. The institutions with the highest incidence of terms were: Federal University of Itajubá (189), Federal University of Uberlândia (65), Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Southern Minas Gerais (38), and Federal Institute of the Triângulo Mineiro (38). The analysis of pedagogical projects revealed three main ways in which projects are implemented as an AL strategy: as exercises, as course components, or as project-based curricula. The results indicate that 55% of the programs adopted projects as course components, 24% implemented projects as exercises, and 21% of the programs were project-oriented. Each of these pedagogical approaches impacts the learning dynamics in different ways, as discussed in light of the specialized literature.
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