European Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 00, No. 0, Month 2009, 1–14 Enhancing project-oriented learning by joining communities of practice and opening spaces for relatedness R. Pascual*† a Centro de Mineria, P. Universidad Católica de Chile,Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Santiago, Chile. (Received 6 March 2009; final version received 1 April 2009 ) This article describes an extension to project-oriented learning to increase social construction of knowl- edge and learning. The focus is on: (a) maximising opportunities for students to share their knowledge with practitioners by joining communities of practice, and (b) increasing their intrinsic motivation by creating conditions for student’s relatedness. The case study considers a last year capstone course in Mechani- cal Engineering. The work addresses innovative practices of active learning and beyond project-oriented learning through: (a) the development of a web-based decision support system, (b) meetings between the communities of students, maintenance engineers and academics, and (c) new off-campus group instances. The author hypothesises that this multi-modal approach increases deep learning and social impact of the educational process. Surveys to the actors support a successful achievement of the educational goals. The methodology can easily be extended to further improve the learning process. Keywords: active learning; engineering education; mechanical engineering; project organised learning; teamwork 1. Introduction The Mechanical Engineering undergraduate programme at the University of Chile includes a capstone course on Maintenance Management. The primary goal is that ‘at the end of the course the student should be capable of designing a maintenance strategy for an industrial facility using objective criteria’. Since 2001, however, the course has been continuously adjusted to better help meet the programme’s instrumental and interpersonal/systemic outcomes. Based on the Tuning guidelines (Tuning project 2007), 12 instrumental competencies and 17 interpersonal/systemic competencies were specified (Various 2005). Given the strict limits of space, this work will address only those that are seen as the most affected during the course under consideration (Table 1). Choosing an appropriate pedagogic approach and assessing the achievement of such goals are not easy tasks, as the educator needs the actions of the students and learning/evaluation tools to motivate and infer their knowledge gain (Boisot 1999, Prince 2004). This paper describes a socio-constructivist view on such a process and looks at a case study in the Mechanical Engineering programme. The focusing question here is ‘can we demonstrate *Email: rpascual@ing.puc.cl †Author was at Universidad de Chile at the time this study was carried out ISSN 0304-3797 print/ISSN 1469-5898 online © 2009 SEFI DOI: 10.1080/03043790902989234 http://www.informaworld.com