Abstract:

We present a promising methodology that is currently being followed in the supervision and guidance of Master and PhD courses in Engineering.

We have combined and linked different team management tools, collaborative software and social networks.

Our docent tool chart is composed by the following elements:
- A blog designed to contain the main topics in the research area where the students are beginning to be immersed; Goals and objectives; Summary of activities prepared for evaluation as homework. The blog is linked and used to update social networks.
- Social networks (Twitter and Facebook) to connect the students to the main research institutions carrying out research in a particular field, and more importantly, to the main EU-FP7 projects that represent the forefront of technological progress.
- A collaborative repository in the cloud, containing bibliography, references, seminars, and lectures presentations.
- Task managing software in the cloud, that allows task definition, completeness status, following progress, and an additional system to communicate between the student and the tutor (email and chat). In addition, the responsible of the activity can assign observers for every task, so students can evaluate and learn from the progress of other mates.

Our methodology has showed a three-fold benefit:
- Effectiveness in transferring concepts linked to exercises organized into tasks.
- Improvement of students’ level of comprehension, and what is more important, their organization skills. The collaborative software used, allows classification of the work provided to the students into different levels of priority.
- Relating their work to the main actors in the EU research arena, and being up to date with the last technological advances, leads the students to manifest an increment in motivation.

Keywords:

Social Networks and Education, Collaborative work, task managing, supervised guidance.