The importance of blog as a communication tool to support the development of project-based learning

The Integrated Project of Industrial Engineering and Management (IPIEM) is a curricular unit of the 4 year developed in the 1 semester of Master Integrated degree of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) – University of Minho, Portugal is based on Project-Based Learning (PBL) methodology. In this context, it was proposed to the students of this year and program, a project to be developed in an industrial environment. Each team of students should go to a company with the objective to analyse, diagnose and improve a production system or a section of the company selected. The team of nine students, where the first author of this paper was integrated chosen for the project a security shoes company. Through the PBL, the team had the opportunity to apply theoretical concepts from different technical contents of disciplinary domains to Engineering real-problems and develop transferable competences. To communicate with teams’ members, colleagues, teachers and tutors and to organize and register data and information it was used a blog, designed as support for the project. Thus, this paper has as main objective to evaluate the blog importance, used in the support of teaching/learning activities. In order to evaluate this importance, it was developed a survey applied to the 4 students that used the blog and the survey results were critically analysed. The survey results presented in this paper show that the blog was useful in this context, improving the interaction between team members and the students’ team and the coordination team of teachers, tutors and researchers.