The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of higher education institution facilities worldwide. This unprecedented situation disrupted traditional teaching and learning activities, necessitating the development of tools to ensure the continuation of educational processes. This situation demanded a technological solution to support learning activities within the framework of a Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) approach. Following a thorough review of existing tools, the decision was made to design a bespoke tool that facilitates competence development through CBL. Consequently, a mobile application named Klever 21 was developed. This mobile app, complemented by a web-based platform, aims to enhance project management and enable the evaluation of student competencies. In a previous work details of the core functionalities of Klever 21 were provided. Accordingly this innovation represents an evolution in mobile app technology designed to address the challenges posed by disruptive events in higher education.

The global spread of COVID-19 led to the partial or complete closure of higher education institutions, contingent on local government policies. This disruption forced institutions to innovate in their teaching methodologies and adopt new technologies to sustain operations. However in the post-covid era these technologies continued to be important and relevant for educational approaches such as CBL. CBL is an approach that immerses students in real-world problems and engages them in developing practical solutions. Research indicates that CBL enhances student learning outcomes by promoting deeper knowledge acquisition. Accordingly the participation of associated training partners is essential to provide real-world challenges that foster competence development. These training partners, including external organizations, educational institutions, and companies, offer authentic, real-world problems that students must address. By solving these challenges, students acquire both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary competencies. On this realm the need for a technological tool to enable coordinated communication and collaboration among students, companies, and professors became evident. Additionally, this tool needed to support the remote evaluation of student competencies by allowing evaluators to complete assessment instruments electronically and generate real-time diagnostics of students’ competence development.

The evaluation of competencies within the CBL framework, particularly for undergraduate and postgraduate students, remains an area of active research. Nevertheless, a structured evaluation mechanism is critical for assessing competence development. The envisioned support tool needed to incorporate the ability to design diverse evaluation instruments tailored to competence development within the CBL paradigm. Consequently, the requirements for the tool were defined to include ease of use, free accessibility, scalability to accommodate varying numbers of students, professors, and training partners, and the integration of evaluation instruments for competence assessment. Given these considerations, a mobile application was identified as the most suitable technological solution.

This article introduces Klever 21, a mobile application developed to facilitate competence development through CBL for industrial engineers, and describes the experimental design employed to verify and validate the application’s effectiveness.

Keywords: Competence-based education, challenge-based learning, mobile technology, educational innovation, higher education, professional education.