Development of an Online Social Network for Supporting the Design, Coordination, and Following-up of Final Projects in Engineering

This research applies an online social network for managing and improving final projects of students of both engineering degrees and master degrees of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. The main idea is to use this technological tool, which has proved to be efficient in industrial and service organizations, to improve not only the communication process between students and their supervisors but also to support the activities of design, coordination, and following-up of such final projects. Additionally, it will help to assess the transversal competence named CT-05-Design and project. The results showed that, through the interchange of information between and among the different users established, the topics developed and treated within the OSN were about the production of the final project (82% of the information flows), offers of work/internships as well as about work fairs (10%) and other topics (8%), being most of the topics were posted by the final project supervisors. From a survey carried out via the OSN, it is possible to affirm that the usage of an OSN can be useful to students when developing their final projects.