Lecturer's blog 8: "Project-Based Courses for Future-Proof Education" by Petros Milionis

Project-Based Courses for Future-Proof Education

In a few weeks we will be completing two years of operating in a new teaching environment that prior to the pandemic very few people could have imagined. Looking back at the experience of the past two years, I feel that it has led not only to changes in the way we conduct our teaching activities, but it has also forced us to question some of our views on teaching. For example, I used to think that the key to a successful course was in the course development process. Hence, my aim for each of my courses was to carefully plan all course activities, come up with an effective assessment protocol, prepare all material ahead of time, and this would largely ensure that everything would function smoothly each time the course was being offered.

The last two years have put this view to a serious test. The transition to online and hybrid instruction forced us to confront issues that we never thought of in the past. Course activities that used to be effective when conducted on campus became difficult to replicate under a different instruction mode. Forms of assessment that were commonly used had to be modified or replaced. Standard course exams would now require the involvement of many more people, including ICT support staff. Even when the transition in the mode of instruction and assessment was smooth, it was not often sufficient to achieve the same level of student engagement. This was because students experienced their own difficulties in adapting to the new teaching environment and remaining focused on their studies. Previous contributions to this blog bear testament to the wide range of challenges that we had to deal with and the need for more active course management.

In this post, however, I would like to talk about one exception to this general pattern: one course where things worked out well, despite these major changes to the teaching environment. The course is Honors Research Seminar II and, as the name indicates, it is a research seminar for honors bachelor students, which I instructed last semester in hybrid mode and the year before fully online. The reasons for the success of the course in the current teaching environment are probably several and they definitely include the remarkable resilience and diligence of our honors students. The hypothesis that I would like to entertain here, though, is that part of the success is due to some particular features of the course.

Honors Research Seminar II is a project-based course. It aims to expose students to the research frontier in economics and business, and it asks them to take the first steps in developing their own research project to address an open research question. Students have to work on this in teams, put together their own team, divide responsibilities within the team and decide for themselves how to complete the key course tasks and assignments. At the same time, there is careful supervision of their work from the beginning to the end of the course. Students have to indicate who is doing what in each team, they have to submit progress updates and there are regular feedback moments to review their progress. In parallel students have to follow lectures, which cover relevant material for their projects, and tutorials, which guide them on how to complete the different course assignments. The course culminates in a competition among the student teams for the best research project and their assessment is also based on the quality of their project instead of an exam.

What is important to mention here is that none of these features of the course were introduced during the pandemic. In fact I have been teaching this course for more than ten years, with some occasional changes in the topics covered and the co-teachers involved, but always following the same project-based structure. This course structure builds on a long tradition of project-based learning in higher education, which aims to activate student learning through direct experience and application of knowledge. To achieve this, students need to be presented with a challenging setup where they have to address a complex question. Students then proceed in a stepwise function to address that through a series of interim tasks which require collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. This serves like a scaffold in order to assemble the final project, through a process of guided learning and reflection.

While this mode of instruction is not something new, my recent experience in the course suggests that it can be quite an advantage during the current teaching environment that we are facing. This is because the project-related activities in the course force students to take a more active role and control their own learning process. This reduces the relative importance of scheduled course meetings for student learning and it allows for some more degrees of freedom in planning these meetings. This fluidity and flexibility in the course structure have been extremely useful in the past two years, as instruction mode has shifted from being on-campus to on-line or to a hybrid setup. The project feedback moments also provide a different way to connect with the students, which can be quite valuable in times where on-campus interactions are limited. Overall my impression is that these features have contributed to the smooth running of the course, despite the current challenging circumstances, and course evaluation reports appear to confirm that.

Could this approach be applied to other courses? This is the thought that led me to write this blog post and share my experience. Although there are courses where project-based learning is difficult to incorporate, I am aware of several courses at the Faculty where elements of project-based learning are applicable and some courses where they are already being applied. For such courses it is possible that these elements could alleviate some of the present challenges in both instruction and assessment. Moreover, even when the pandemic is eventually behind us, there can still be benefits from doing so in terms of student engagement. As we move away from traditional patterns of instruction and new blended modes of instruction become more common, this may be the time to give project-based learning a try.

For the next blog post I would like to invite my colleague at EEF and former lecturer of the year at University, Marc Kramer, to share his recent experiences from the broad range of courses that he teaches.