Understanding the use of paper and online logbooks for final year undergraduate engineering projects

In industry an engineer is often required to keep a logbook for recording developments within projects. In higher education, logbooks are a commonly used tool thought to be one that encourages active independent learning and reflective thinking. In School of Engineering, at University of Portsmouth, paper and more recently online logbooks have been in use for recording work for final year projects and project based learning tasks. The work presented here benefits from a unique opportunity within the School of Engineering, where online logbooks alongside traditional paper based logbooks are being used within final year projects. A recent cohort of students (N=127) on ENG600 project module was given the option, through their Supervisors, to use paper logbooks and or online logbooks for recording their work. This work aims to investigate the use of both paper and online logbooks. A mix of Qualitative Research methods and quantitative techniques will be used in this project. The use of content analysis will provide an insight into student reflections and their motivations for using their logbook. Furthermore focus groups, involving live editing of documents in an individual and collaborative fashion, will be used to gather more data for analysis. Quantitative methods (questionnaire, analytics and quantitative content analysis) will also be used in this study. When this work is completed, it will provide guidance and comparison on using the two types of logbooks, backed by knowledge of student motivations and approaches.