Students Development of Projects: A Comparison of Stakeholders Perspectives

Industry has been calling for recent graduates to be prepared to face the challenges of modern industrial landscape. Industry employers require students to not solely focus on the technical aspects of their fields, but also to possess other types of skills, usually called “soft skills” or “transferable skills”. Project-based learning is a pedagogical strategy that can contribute to prepare students for these challenges, providing them with a non-structured environment where they must solve a real-life problem, in a context similar to what they will find in their future jobs. At the same time, student projects involving Industry and Academia in close cooperation may contribute to improve the ties between these two worlds. The Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics at the University of Aveiro offers a project based course in the Electronic Engineering Master degree, where groups of four to six students are required to solve a problem proposed by an external company. This option of having an external proponent for the project was adopted, among other reasons, to place the students in the situation of having to understand a context different from their own. This paper examines different perspectives from students and their supervisors, both in academia and industry, about which topics students find more difficult. The results are based on surveys, completed by both students and supervisors, that address different aspects of project development and how these stakeholders perceive the level of difficulty faced by the students. These results, as well as the differences of perspective between them, provide valuable insights to conduct the future offer of the course.