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 aresupported by teachers and other students. This proposal covers the benefits of the use of shared knowledge repositories inwhich content was created by students. Teamwork is the transversal competence that is considered to be the centralknowledge topic. The cooperation among students through teamwork methodology has generated more than 500 learningresources and a knowledge management system, BRACO, which has been created with these resources to manageinformation and conduct searches according to each student’s profile and needs. The generated knowledge spiral iscomposed of knowledge circles that increase during each iteration of the action-research implementation. The reflectionphase of this research consists of the evaluation of the impact on learning for students in the experimental group after usingthe knowledge resources generated by students in relation with teamwork competence, in contrast with the control groupthat 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 controlgroup, 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.