Internet information retrieval for enabling student projects

Project-based learning (PBL) is becoming an integral part of many information technology (IT) courses. Students are guided through individual or group projects to learn and apply many of the IT concepts they learn in a course. However, a significant percentage of IT projects depend on the existence of large sets of information or live data. Therefore, it becomes difficult to complete and properly test many of the implemented projects. Some examples of such projects are financial data mining, information notification systems, weather monitoring systems, and decision support systems. While the needed information for the student projects is usually available over the Internet, there is no easy way to retrieve and reuse the required information. In this paper, we propose, describe, and discuss a tool called InetRetriever. This tool can be easily used by students to retrieve in real-time any required real information from the Internet. The students can use this tool to implement, execute, and test their projects with real life data. This tool was tested in different information technology courses to enable effective and realistic project-based learning. Using this tool we observed increased student interest in the project development and higher levels of interactions and learning.