Project-Based Learning

I mentioned in a previous posting and in my interview with Jon Udell that I'm a big fan of project-based learning.

The basic idea of project-based learning is that each student (or group of students) chooses a project that interests them and that covers areas of the state curriculum that they must satisfy. The project is approved by a teacher/board and then assisted during its execution by one or more advisors. Since students are working on something that engages them, they find it much easier to stay motivated and focused. It's also much more real-world; students are expected to seek information and assistance when necessary, rather than being spoon-fed knowledge for subsequent regurgitation.

We're going to add support for project-based learning into edu 2.0 during Q1, and I thought it would be fun to blog about the design process.

First of all, there are several basic requirements for a straightforward implementation:

• a way to input/edit/display the project definition
• a way to assign one or more students to a project
• a way to assign one or more advisors to the project
• some kind of forum/daily journal for the project
• workflow to support the project approval process
• a task list that students can maintain for the project
• a way for the advisors (and maybe parents) to monitor the project
• a way to link a project to the curriculum requirements it meets
• a way to grade the project and display the results

After some thought, we realized that our site already almost supports many of these features. For example, with a little tweaking, our moderation process for material approval could be used to approve project proposals. Similarly, we could add a project as a kind of assignment and then immediately leverage our classroom management and grading features. Likewise, our discussion forum code could be tweaked a little to support the concept of a project journal. The main remaining things seem to be a task list and group assignments, which shouldn't be hard to implement.

However, the really cool stuff happens when you start to share projects in a community. Not only does this create a rich repository of projects, but it also allows teachers and students to interact with other teachers and students who have done the same project. Imagine being a teacher who's new to project-based learning and being able to tap into the experience of other teachers who have already advised the same project. Or see the journals of the students who have already completed the project. The list goes on.

I'm really looking forward to adding these features to our site. And like the rest of the core features on the site, support for project-based learning will be absolutely free for teachers and students.

Comments

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Graham, this sounds really great! I've been doing project-based learning in my online classes for several years now (students build websites instead of doing a final paper) - and I wanted to chime in here on the value of sharing projects and archiving projects. Students learn SO MUCH MORE from seeing the work of other students than they do from listening to me preach! Over time I've accumulated hundreds of student projects, and I can see that each semester the projects get better and better and better exactly because students are able to look at what previous students did, and thus raise their aspirations a bit higher each time. One of the activities I have students do in the first week of my Indian Epics class, for example, is to look at the projects from past semesters and pick their favorites. Then, when they start to define their own projects the next week, they have some concrete, real, actual sense of the possibilities! This is a big help when students are embarking on a topic - like ancient Indian epics - which is otherwise totally alien to them! Instead of me orienting them, previous students lead the way!

I'm not sure if HTML is allowed here, but here's the URL

http://mythfolklore.net/india/orientation/storybook.htm

[Morgan Benton]

Hello Graham,

I do research in the area of technology support for teaching and education, and based on what I know about you, we have a similar approach to/philosophy about education. I read about you in Jon's blog.

I'm currently using BaseCamp (http://www.basecamphq.com/) to manage PBL with my college students. It has almost all of the features that you just blogged about needing for edu20. My students have found they like the system so much that they have begun creating their own accounts so that they can use it to manage their project work with other teams in other classes. BaseCamp, as you may know, is a hosted solution so you can't install it on your own server. However, they do have an API and I've written a few scripts to extend its capabilities to support some of the things I do as an instructor. The API, is somewhat limited--you don't have full access to all of the functionality in the system.

Alternatively, there is a free and open source project called ActiveCollab (http://www.activecollab.com/) which is a knock-off of BaseCamp for people like me who would rather put it on their own server. It doesn't quite have all of the features of BaseCamp, but it is open source so if I really wanted to (read: if I had the time!) I could add the features that I want. This code base is something that you might be able to use in implementing PBL in edu20. At the very least you could study these two systems for their feature sets.

We should chat some time! Keep up the good work.