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Social networks and project-led education are two research topics that have been increasing over the last years. This paper is focused on application of social network analysis on a social network-based project, developed for an engineering course of University of Minho, which followed the project-led education methodology. The study aims at analyz...
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Context 1
... et al., 2004). Closeness centrality presents distances between actors and describes how closely actors are connected to the entire network population (Hanneman & Riddle, 2005). Over the years, learning through projects has become increasingly important for the learning process of students. Project-led Education (PLE) is a learning approach where students work together in teams to solve large-scale open-ended projects (Powell & Weenk, 2003). This type of project is focused on the students and on their performance, fostering the development of several types of skills, such as communication, time management, project management or entrepreneurship (Powell & Weenk, 2003; Helle et al., 2006; Lima et al., 2007). This paper presents a case study of a social network-based project following the methodology of PLE. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the impact and the relevance of this new type of project on the stu dents’ learning process. It is also intended to show that SNA techniques can be effectively applied in this kind of social network-based project and to present some ideas of how those techniques can be used for the students ́ evaluation process. This project represents a pioneer experience and was performed during two months with students from an industrial engineering and management master course. The idea of creating this new type of learning methodology was designed to stimulate a new way of working, in order to prepare the students for a completely different professional context. With the unpredictable employment situation, it is important to instruct students to deal with different approaches (i.e. working in social network-based projects or working as freelancers), which differ from the approaches that they are accustomed to (i.e. working in group projects or working with traditional companies). Besides this Section 1 of the introduction and brief literature review, this paper includes five more sections. In Section 2 the concept of social network-based project is described. Section 3 presents a case study of a social network-based project. Section 4 shows the social network analysis with some important measures of network structure. In Section 5 some hypotheses and directions for future work are discussed. Finally, the conclusions about this study are presented in Section 6. The concept of social network-based project can be considered as a project where participants are seen as a social network, in which work assignments could be done in a crowdsourcing manner and where participants may use or not social networks platforms and tools to perform the tasks of the project. This kind of projects could promote also collaborative environment where two or more people can interact with each other and edit documents at the same time. A key aspect of social network-based projects is that it can foster the development of agility and self-organization. In education, social network-based project can be understood as a further development of the PLE methodology, since the teaching method is based on the project that integrates two or more subject courses. From other side, while the traditional PLE is based on fixed working groups by students along the course (the group formed by students themselves or by teachers), in the social network-based PLE project similarly there are predefined groups (which corresponds to one type of the actors of the social network) but there also exist other types of actors (project coordinators and individual resources) that permits self-organization and higher levels of agility. The social network-based project presented in this paper followed the PLE methodology and was performed on an engineering course during a period of two months. The project was part of the evaluation of the curricular units of Computer Assisted Design/Computer Assisted Process Plan (CAD/CAPP) and Computer Assisted Manufacturing (CAM) of the 4 th year of the Industrial Engineering and Management master course of University of Minho. This was the first time that this experience occurred in the course. A total of 43 students participated in the project where 6 of them were defined as project coordinators and the remaining 37 students were assigned as resources of two types, namely, as individual resources and group resources. Each one of those 37 remaining students were assigned as an individual resource and were also organized in 6 working groups, in accordance with traditional PLE methodology, and each working group were assigned as a group resource type. So, the total number of participants were 43 students but in total, the “social network” to realize the assigned projects consisted of 49 actors, i.e. 6 project coordinators (C1, C2, etc.), 37 individual resources (R1, R2, etc.) and 6 working groups (G1, G2, etc.). In this paper the SNA was only applied to the sub-network of actors of the individual type, i.e. the 6 project coordinators and the 37 individual resources. The assigned projects to be realized were divided in a number of tasks that were launched by the project coordinators to all actors simultaneously and these tasks were assigned to individual “resources” (students) based on the negotiation between the coordinator and the candidate “ resource ” (student) . The ties among the actors of the social network, that could be the subject of the SNA, could be of different types, such as communication processes, accomplished tasks and failed tasks. In this paper it was only considered the type of accomplished tasks for the application of SNA. That is, for each accomplished task, there will be established a link between the coordinator that launched that task and the individual resource that accomplished it. The first thing to do in social network analysis is the network modelling. For this purpose, firstly, it was created a matrix with all ties that occurred between the project coordinators and the individual resources, only regarding the accomplished tasks at the end of the project. In that matrix, 1 was assigned in cases when an individual resource accomplish a task for a coordinator and 0 for the opposite situation. The matrix was uploaded in the software UCINET, which was the software tool for the SNA execution. Figure 1 represents part of the matrix uploaded. After that, in the same software, the social network graph was created (Figure 2). Figure 2 represents all ties that occurred between the different actors during the project, in terms of accomplished tasks. With this social network graph it is possible to see with how many individual resources the coordinators interacted with and also to have an idea of the actors who had more activity in the ...
Context 2
... et al., 2004). Closeness centrality presents distances between actors and describes how closely actors are connected to the entire network population (Hanneman & Riddle, 2005). Over the years, learning through projects has become increasingly important for the learning process of students. Project-led Education (PLE) is a learning approach where students work together in teams to solve large-scale open-ended projects (Powell & Weenk, 2003). This type of project is focused on the students and on their performance, fostering the development of several types of skills, such as communication, time management, project management or entrepreneurship (Powell & Weenk, 2003; Helle et al., 2006; Lima et al., 2007). This paper presents a case study of a social network-based project following the methodology of PLE. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the impact and the relevance of this new type of project on the stu dents’ learning process. It is also intended to show that SNA techniques can be effectively applied in this kind of social network-based project and to present some ideas of how those techniques can be used for the students ́ evaluation process. This project represents a pioneer experience and was performed during two months with students from an industrial engineering and management master course. The idea of creating this new type of learning methodology was designed to stimulate a new way of working, in order to prepare the students for a completely different professional context. With the unpredictable employment situation, it is important to instruct students to deal with different approaches (i.e. working in social network-based projects or working as freelancers), which differ from the approaches that they are accustomed to (i.e. working in group projects or working with traditional companies). Besides this Section 1 of the introduction and brief literature review, this paper includes five more sections. In Section 2 the concept of social network-based project is described. Section 3 presents a case study of a social network-based project. Section 4 shows the social network analysis with some important measures of network structure. In Section 5 some hypotheses and directions for future work are discussed. Finally, the conclusions about this study are presented in Section 6. The concept of social network-based project can be considered as a project where participants are seen as a social network, in which work assignments could be done in a crowdsourcing manner and where participants may use or not social networks platforms and tools to perform the tasks of the project. This kind of projects could promote also collaborative environment where two or more people can interact with each other and edit documents at the same time. A key aspect of social network-based projects is that it can foster the development of agility and self-organization. In education, social network-based project can be understood as a further development of the PLE methodology, since the teaching method is based on the project that integrates two or more subject courses. From other side, while the traditional PLE is based on fixed working groups by students along the course (the group formed by students themselves or by teachers), in the social network-based PLE project similarly there are predefined groups (which corresponds to one type of the actors of the social network) but there also exist other types of actors (project coordinators and individual resources) that permits self-organization and higher levels of agility. The social network-based project presented in this paper followed the PLE methodology and was performed on an engineering course during a period of two months. The project was part of the evaluation of the curricular units of Computer Assisted Design/Computer Assisted Process Plan (CAD/CAPP) and Computer Assisted Manufacturing (CAM) of the 4 th year of the Industrial Engineering and Management master course of University of Minho. This was the first time that this experience occurred in the course. A total of 43 students participated in the project where 6 of them were defined as project coordinators and the remaining 37 students were assigned as resources of two types, namely, as individual resources and group resources. Each one of those 37 remaining students were assigned as an individual resource and were also organized in 6 working groups, in accordance with traditional PLE methodology, and each working group were assigned as a group resource type. So, the total number of participants were 43 students but in total, the “social network” to realize the assigned projects consisted of 49 actors, i.e. 6 project coordinators (C1, C2, etc.), 37 individual resources (R1, R2, etc.) and 6 working groups (G1, G2, etc.). In this paper the SNA was only applied to the sub-network of actors of the individual type, i.e. the 6 project coordinators and the 37 individual resources. The assigned projects to be realized were divided in a number of tasks that were launched by the project coordinators to all actors simultaneously and these tasks were assigned to individual “resources” (students) based on the negotiation between the coordinator and the candidate “ resource ” (student) . The ties among the actors of the social network, that could be the subject of the SNA, could be of different types, such as communication processes, accomplished tasks and failed tasks. In this paper it was only considered the type of accomplished tasks for the application of SNA. That is, for each accomplished task, there will be established a link between the coordinator that launched that task and the individual resource that accomplished it. The first thing to do in social network analysis is the network modelling. For this purpose, firstly, it was created a matrix with all ties that occurred between the project coordinators and the individual resources, only regarding the accomplished tasks at the end of the project. In that matrix, 1 was assigned in cases when an individual resource accomplish a task for a coordinator and 0 for the opposite situation. The matrix was uploaded in the software UCINET, which was the software tool for the SNA execution. Figure 1 represents part of the matrix uploaded. After that, in the same software, the social network graph was created (Figure 2). Figure 2 represents all ties that occurred between the different actors during the project, in terms of accomplished tasks. With this social network graph it is possible to see with how many individual resources the coordinators interacted with and also to have an idea of the actors who had more activity in the ...
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Citations
... The main research questions for this study (where some of them were first mentioned as future work by Putnik et al. (2013)) are the following: Q1: Are SNA measures significantly correlated with the students' final grades? ...
Social network-based engineering education (SNEE) is designed and implemented as a model of Education 3.0 paradigm. SNEE represents a new learning methodology, which is based on the concept of social networks and represents an extended model of project-led education. The concept of social networks was applied in the real-life experiment, considering two different dimensions: (1) to organize the education process as a social network-based process; and (2) to analyze the students’ interactions in the context of evaluation of the students learning performance. The objective of this paper is to present a new model for students evaluation based on their behavior during the course and its validation in comparison with the traditional model of students’ evaluation. The validation of the new evaluation model is made through an analysis of the correlation between social network analysis measures (degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and average tie strength) and the grades obtained by students (grades for quality of work, grades for volume of work, grades for diversity of work, and final grades) in a social network-based engineering education. The main finding is that the obtained correlation results can be used to make the process of the students’ performance evaluation based on students interactions (behavior) analysis, to make the evaluation partially automatic, increasing the objectivity and productivity of teachers and allowing a more scalable process of evaluation. The results also contribute to the behavioural theory of learning performance evaluation. More specific findings related to the correlation analysis are: (1) the more different interactions a student had (degree centrality) and the more frequently the student was between the interaction paths of other students (betweenness centrality), the better was the quality of the work; (2) all five social network measures had a positive and strong correlation with the grade for volume of work and with the final grades; and (3) a student with high average tie strength had a higher grade for diversity of work than those with low ties.
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