Use of Social Media for Group Design Project in Higher Technical Education

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, etc.) are ubiquitous in both personal and professional lives each one of us. All over the world social media are changing the way of communication, information sharing, reporting, marketing and many other sectors. Therefore it is no surprise that more and more frequently they find use in tuition students of all ages but most noticeable in higher education. Teachers generally implement social media into education to improve the availability of study materials and increase their active self-study. In most cases it is only the technology that students are commonly using in their private life and they have to learn to use them effectively during their studies. Few studies have doubts about the benefits of using social media as a learning tool, but vast majority of existing studies demonstrate the efficiency and benefits of social media implemented in education. Social media also provides many new possibilities to gather information and they also connect formal and informal educational process. This paper describes the use of social media during work on group design projects solved under the subjects taught at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (UWB) at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (FME) in the Department of Machine Design (DMD). Teaching of these subjects is based on Project Based Learning (PBL). Students have to design the entire structure of the specific component, equipment, tool or machine within study of these subjects. To solve this design problems, students are motivated to use all of the above mentioned technologies for effective group communication, data sharing, planning, information gathering and anything else what social media enable. All problems, processes and procedures of the design process are monitored and recorded. These recorded data are further used by solvers of similar study projects and also projects carried out in cooperation with industrial companies. There is an effort to make these sets of information also freely available to the public via social media and open source projects.