Team Building through Student's Preferences and Competences (TBSPC): implementation on a PBL platform

Project-Based Learning (PBL) has been widely used in education, helping students to develop technical knowledge within a critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and communication environment. Thus, PBL has the students as the main object, enabling them to decide on real-life focus situations, proposing, through teamwork, solutions to problems and/or getting the most of the opportunities. PBL promotes enjoyable learning, allowing the direct mandatory participation of students, teachers and the owners of the real-life situations under consideration, as well as the eventual participation of other relevant stakeholders. However, in most cases, the choice of teams is made manually by the teacher, through criteria that many times result in lack of coherence and equity between the project teams. This undesirably affects the overall group performance due to conflicts, communication gaps and lack of transparency. In this paper, a flexible module is proposed to digitize and automate team-building processes, based on students’ preferences and competences. This module, called Team Building through Student’s Preferences and Competences (TBSPC), may be applied to any type of PBL project and offers to students the possibility to contribute in the PBL team pre-creation phase, allowing their decision-making based within some settings previously established by teachers. This makes PBL teams coherent, complementary and congruent with the project. The effectiveness of the mechanisms for creating teams and their impact on the teams’ performance in PBL courses are a focus for the TBSPC module development in the context of the Brazil and Tunisia partnership. This module will be part of the Platform for Unifying Methodologies of Active learning (PUMA) which is a platform for centralization and automation of PBL processes for university courses.