Students' knowledge sharing to improve learning in academic engineering courses

This paper presents an example of scaffolding during the development of an engineering course, in which students are supported by teachers and other students. This proposal covers the benefits of the use of shared knowledge repositories in which content was created by students. Teamwork is the transversal competence that is considered to be the central knowledge topic. The cooperation among students through teamwork methodology has generated more than 500 learning resources and a knowledge management system, BRACO, which has been created with these resources to manage information and conduct searches according to each student’s profile and needs. The generated knowledge spiral is composed of knowledge circles that increase during each iteration of the action-research implementation. The reflection phase of this research consists of the evaluation of the impact on learning for students in the experimental group after using the knowledge resources generated by students in relation with teamwork competence, in contrast with the control group that does not experience this intervention. With regard to the assessments, several surveys and a learning analytics system, this paper explains the underlying methodological foundations and the empirical study. In comparison to the control group, the experimental group obtained better results in relation to indicators of positive learning results, such as student-student interaction, teamwork development and final grades during the teamwork process.