Team-Based Learning gets a platform: undergraduate thesis moves the methodology from the classroom to the cloud
Victor Hugo Arnaud Deon defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis developing PGTBL — an open-source platform to manage Team-Based Learning activities in university courses.
Brasília, July 12, 2019
Teamwork, data analysis, and real-world problem solving — three competencies the market demands and that traditional classrooms deliver only halfway. Team-Based Learning (TBL) has been pointed to as a path across that gap, and it is around it that Victor Hugo Arnaud Deon built his undergraduate thesis, defended in July 2019 at FCTE/UnB under the advising of Prof. Cristiane Soares Ramos .
The work introduces PGTBL — Team-Based Learning Management Platform —, an open-source piece of software that operationalizes the methodology’s steps: team formation, individual and collective assessments, group discussion, and feedback. The choice of open source is deliberate and matters: public and private higher education institutions can adopt, adapt, and evolve the tool without the lock-in that plagues proprietary platforms.
By connecting Teamwork with active learning methodologies , the thesis offers a piece of infrastructure for instructors willing to experiment with TBL without having to reinvent the whole activity-management scaffolding — often the primary reason people give up when trying to move away from lecture-based teaching.
One published fruit of this research line is the paper TBL as an active learning-teaching methodology for software engineering courses, presented at the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES 2018, São Carlos). Victor Deon appears among the authors alongside Cristiane Ramos, Ricardo Ajax, Elaine Venson and Rejane Figueiredo — evidence that the PGTBL platform emerges anchored in empirical evaluation of the methodology.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.