Enhancing the Project-Based Learning Experience Through the Use of Live Web Data

Project-based learning (PBL) was proven to be a very useful model to give students hands on experiences and allow them to be active learners rather than passive listeners. In this paper we introduce a tool to help enhance the project development experiences for information technology (IT) students. The main purpose of this tool is to help reuse web information to enable IT projects for students. This tool is called InetRetriever and it can be easily used by students to retrieve, in real-time, any required real information from the web and to implement, execute, and test their projects with real life data. As PBL is becoming an integral part of many information technology (IT) courses, and in many cases real data is essential for many types of projects, it becomes important to make such data available and accessible easily. In various cases, students focus gets shifted from the real objectives of a project when they spend a lot of their time trying to find data or create methods to get them this data. Furthermore, many projects fail and cannot demonstrate their real capabilities when they are tested and demonstrated using small sets of sample data or some fabricated data sets because the students could not include real data available on the Internet. Another possibility here is that students could not even complete their projects because of the difficulties in retrieving the required data and the excess amount of time they spend on that tasks rather than on the real tasks in the project. Therefore, InetRetriever was developed to overcome this obstacle. It was tested in different information technology courses to enable effective and realistic project-based learning. Using this tool we observed increased student interest in the project development and higher levels of interactions and learning.