Chapter Goal: This chapter identifies the types of learning interactions that occur on project-based courses. It dives into the foundations of project-based learning (PjBL) environments touching on the core features of PjBL, the types of learning interactions that occur, and the multiple types of roles that instructors play and how students learn. This chapter reveals the balance between teaching and mentoring when guiding learners on emerging technology project development. It charts known unknowns and unknown unknowns that readily occur within project-based courses that explains why mentoring is a key role that instructors will play.
To teach in a post-secondary learning environment
You need to understand some theory and research in PjBL
A creature ferrying a scholar across a turbulent river said something ungrammatical to them. “Have you studied grammar?” asked the scholar. “No”, grumbled the beast. “Then half of your life has been wasted.” A few minutes later the creature turned to the passenger startling them. “Have you ever learned how to swim?”, they growled. “No”, replied the scholar. “Then all your life is wasted – we are sinking!”
(Revised Sufi tale, unknown source)
Foundations of Project-Based Learning
If you are new to taking on teaching a course in a more formal learning environment, then you might feel a bit like that creature, ferrying learners across the at-times turbulent and unknown waters of project-based learning (PjBL). Rest assured though that PjBL is so different than most learning environments that even accomplished teachers who have never taught it before can feel uncomfortable and uneasy when they attempt to take it on. It demands a lot from the instructor and the learner. It is helpful then to know that there are some common characteristics to PjBL environments.
Common Characteristics
Activities are centered around solving problems through prototyping.
Identifying problems to solve in a design process sometimes emerges from the act of prototyping.
Learners solve problems together with a constant negotiation of their individual impulses.
They learn not just about how to solve problems, but how they individually contribute to solving them.
The process of solving a problem is more important than the solution itself.
The process of solving problems demands that the learner draw on previous knowledge and is also comfortable uncovering unknown knowledge.
The unknown knowledge students need to acquire is like a piece of a puzzle not yet found, or a handful of puzzle pieces that learners need to try to fit together to determine if they really fit.
The process of solving problems can engage a learner’s curiosity, frustration, and the desire for the mind to propose an ongoing series of solutions.
Team members are challenged to adapt to new kinds of peer relationships.
Learners are persistently assessed based not solely on what they contribute to a conversation or in the completion of an assignment but how they work with others to identify and solve problems in the form of prototypes.
The design encourages students to learn much of what they need to learn, on their own and from each other.
Teaching and mentoring interactions focus on facilitating learners to self-regulate or manage their own learning experience while co-constructing digital prototypes.
Key learning outcomes are matched with competencies learners need to have as they transition into related communities of practice.
Teaching and Learning Interactions in PjBL
Project-based courses are at times misunderstood within academic institutions as courses where students just make stuff. That misunderstanding persists among some academics as if it were a lower form of learning that is somehow lacking in content, critical thinking, rigor, or designed learning outcomes. Those misconceptions are far from the truth. PjBL encompasses all other forms of teaching, such as traditional lecture-based learning, group discussion and problem solving, synchronous and asynchronous activities, and unplanned microlearning sessions as interventions that culminate in a type of capstone or final course project. One of the differences from other types of learning is that activities in a PjBL course are centered around learning all the requirements necessary for students to create a project together that is suitable to the time requirements of the course and that require specific skills they may not yet possess. Centering all learning activities around co-constructing a tangible artifact may sound like simply following the instructions to build a model ship, but if you come from any type of professional industry, being able to navigate others to do so can feel more like building the ship while sailing unknown waters and trying to keep a team staying afloat.
Roles That Instructors Play in PjBL
Managing student teams requires resilience and ability to thrive under pressure that has likely contributed to your own success in the workplace. It requires a similar approach in the workplace that is supportive of fellow workers to make goals, strive for excellence, and remove obstacles to ensure success. Given that PjBL involves different ways of learning, an instructor must be prepared to wear several hats including that of instructional designer, teacher, group facilitator, content creator, conflict resolver, industry advisor, coach, producer, and of course, mentor.
One of those hats an instructor wears is as a mentor, which is an effective and commonly reported interaction between learners and instructors. Those with experience mentoring teams on emerging technology projects in industry have an advantage in understanding many of the challenges learners will face, compared to those who have never had that lived experience. There is no question that the lived experience of supervising and mentoring individuals on your team qualifies you to share expertise at a university level. This includes what you’ve had to learn to contribute to project development, the research you’ve undertaken to improve team performance, management practices, the innovation you may have engaged in, culture and productivity, and the results of those efforts as a published work.
How Students Learn in PjBL
A chart lists 8 ways for student learning. By doing, reading, discussing, reflecting, listening, presenting, watching, and teaching.
Different ways that students learn in PjBL environments
By Doing
In much of the literature on PjBL, there is a persistent description of how people learn. The dominant manner is by “doing.” To be clear, when learners engage in other forms of instruction, they are still actively doing something, whether that something is listening, taking notes, reading, or conversing with other learners and/or the instructor. In PjBL, however, doing is an act of creation. The active verb describes a process through which students gain know-how by fulfilling specific tasks related to project development. Directly and in the case of emerging technology development, this can mean contributing to a project with the creation of 3D or 2D art assets. It can also mean coding interactions if you are a programmer, designing the user interface if you are a UI designer, managing the project if you are a project manager, etc. The process of learning by doing occurs when learners are tasked to create emerging technology together. While engaged in the act of fulfilling tasks they are assigned to, which contribute to a group project, they also come across limitations of their knowledge and know-how and must also learn what they need to stretch beyond their limited know-how.
Compare the process of learning how to play the piano. You can learn about the piano through books and listening. You can learn about the social history of the piano, its role in society, and the music played on it over centuries since its invention. You can learn the theory that influenced how different types of piano music were composed in different musical eras. You can even learn to read piano music. However, the only way to learn how to play the piano is to play it. Then and only then is the mind and body fully engaged in the act of bringing it to life. The other ways of learning the piano may help support the actual playing of the instrument. Playing the piano means developing technique, which when applied to piano music develops the player’s craft. The complexity of what piano compositions that a pianist can play is interdependent on their practice of the technique required to exercise the muscles, dexterity and coordination of the fingers, hands, and body. Once the inherent technique required to play Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in C# minor is embodied through reading the music while playing it, it can be memorized without the need to read the music, as long as the piece of music is persistently practiced. Where the budding piano player has an advantage over a student learning how to develop an emerging technology is that the instrument exists, as does the piece of music (at least in classical piano music). The student in a PjBL environment is prototyping the piano, the music, and user testing how it will best be played.
By Reading
In PjBL, learners must be able to read texts that support them in deepening their understanding of co-constructing projects with others. They read everything from research articles to blog posts and book excerpts to understand the territory, learn what others have done before to solve problems they might encounter, and dissect specific knowledge from the most recent documentation available on a shared code repository to understand how previous code and the coding process can help them with their current undertaking. Reading is directed toward improving their understanding of the project co-constructive process and is less about reading philosophies about project creation than it is about reading documented practice to support their own practice. Those readings are also intended to give students use cases they can compare their work to. It’s comforting to sometimes read about stories of failure from veterans in the digital media industry when you are starting out yourself. Students need to understand that everyone struggles, and that the development of new technology is not easy.
By Teaching
There are multiple occasions where students learn from each other. The best teams are those where individuals share knowledge with others as they are engaged in co-constructing projects together. PjBL acknowledges the value of individual differences and can leverage the knowledge and experience that each person brings to the process of collaborative creation. Learners on teams must also present to the whole class on what they’ve learned while engaging in the co-construction of a project. This back-and-forth knowledge sharing between individuals and teams creates a healthy ecosystem where the instructor is no longer seen as the center of knowledge. This is important as it speaks to one of the outcomes of PjBL, which is to empower learners to self-regulate.
By Watching
By watching and observing experts, students can then apply technique and approach to their own projects. This is achieved through a variety of media that exists to support everything from how to contend with collision of objects in a specific game environment like Unreal to how to manage tasks on an Agile Scrum board. Careful observation of one another during any team meetings is also how students learn to be discerning and how they develop and sustain their own developing practices. Finally, watching the presentation of works in progress or prototypes from other teams challenges learners to focus their attention in the moment, particularly if feedback from those observing is elicited in Q&A afterward.
By Discussing
There is plenty of discussion that occurs during any emerging tech pipeline. Learners actively engage in discussion that is centered around creative solutions to problems, collaboration, and communication. Discussion tends to be focused on supporting their combined efforts to create prototypes and define the user experience of what they are designing. By articulating their thoughts, students share their understanding of every aspect of the PjBL pipeline.
By Presenting
In PjBL environments, tasking learners to persistently (weekly) present their ideas, share their assignments, and report on project process is a strategic way to challenge them to improve how they articulate their ideas. This can be amplified through feedback sessions that follow. Instructors can elicit feedback that has directly to do with how individuals on teams articulated their ideas. Guiding learners in this way can help them be more articulate in how they share their ideas.
By Reflecting
Through regular feedback cycles, students are challenged to reflect on the work they co-create in addition to the process of creation itself. Regularly embedded reflective tools will increase learner awareness and allow them to check in on earlier made goals, adjust performance, and when necessary fine-tune their behaviors to one another. Agile teams that improve over time take the time to conduct Retrospectives at the end of a Sprint or cycle of time. These types of reflective activities remind learners that they may be going through similar challenges that others are and provide multiple opportunities to affirm and be affirmed for their efforts.
By Listening
Along with discussion, students learn by listening to short lectures and presentations by other students and student teams and during project group work. Practicing listening is an important part of a communicative project team, and it will benefit your students to embed different types of listening activities so they can become increasingly aware as to how they communicate with one another through active listening and discussion.
While students learn in many ways as detailed earlier, they also learn in surprising ways. This is because engaging in the co-construction of projects can lead to as many known knowns, as there are unforeseen or unknown situations.
Chart the Known Knowns and the Known Unknowns of PjBL in Post-secondary
“Known unknowns result from phenomena which are recognized, but poorly understood.”
(Report from BC Mining, Canada, 1979)
There are those things we can come to expect and those we cannot when implementing a project-based course in post-secondary settings. This is like a workplace environment where teams engage in creating something new or innovative. In many business settings, the language of a pivot or the practice of pivoting is commonly used to describe the need for an individual, team, or company to shift directions due to unforeseen circumstances. At times, pivots are expected. These are known unknowns because we can accept that they will occur, we recognize them when they do, but we don’t really understand them fully or what shape they’ll take. Understanding the known unknowns that will more than likely occur in PjBL environments can at least prepare you to mitigate them ahead of time, should they arise. It’s always good to have a backup plan.
Projects tend to be motivated by a problem to solve that is not always based on supporting or sustaining a business.
Projects tend to be small in scope compared to a project in industry because students are not “full-time” in the same way, and they are learning their craft and how to apply it with others simultaneously.
Students mainly learn by “doing.” Differently from how they learn in a lecture though, the “doing” is centered around making something. They apply their craft and work together with others to create tangible prototypes and artifacts that culminate in a finished “product.”
Those who facilitate PjBL environments tend to spend most of their time mentoring students, that is, in guiding them toward self-managing what they need to learn to complete a project vs. teaching them specific skills (drawing, coding, how to design).
The final known known of PjBL is that it is easy enough to predict that unexpected or unknown events will occur that learners will have to face and resolve.
Known Unknowns of PjBL Environments
Generalizing research undertaken in PjBL environments that can help us design a project-based course is somewhat useful, but there is some difficulty in drawing from a single project because every project is different, including how the project is managed, how much time learners have to work on it, what technology is being developed, and how much time a mentor needs to spend with the team.
For example, even though we might know the mechanics of how a project management methodology may be applied to a specific project, we don’t really know what will transpire when it is applied by a specific set of learners. The factors that distinguish one project from another will influence how Agile is applied. Teaching the principles of Agile is a known known. The benefits of applying many of the principles of Agile are numerous including its capacity to adapt to any type of collaborative project that learners might take on.
A chart lists known and unknown and their 3 subsections. Project, team, mentor, medium and response.
Some of the KNOWN UNKNOWNS when designing and implementing a PjBL course
Team
The team makeup and the skills that students bring to a project influence what is possible. It’s difficult to know with complete certainty what will make a good project or a client for that matter when you are not even aware of the skills that learners have. You also get what you get and you don’t know what that will be until your first class. Unlike industry, you can’t hire external learners to make up for a lack of skills on a team. The aesthetic of learners is also unknown challenging you to pick projects that are broader in appeal. You don’t really know what project a student will gravitate toward and so giving them choice and balancing how a team is composed vs. student wants is unpredictable. If it is a project with a client partner, then ensuring they too are flexible with what the project becomes is important to keep in mind. This is because students often lack experience with project development and arrive ill-equipped to assess a way forward when they are faced with a problem.
How teams apply the specific tools that you introduce is unknown. As much as you might know how well certain tools work in your own practice, their successful application is often determined by how they are applied and if their function is understood. They will likely be unclear when to apply tools that you model. It is often difficult for students to understand their purpose because they don’t have the same experience of applying the tool across a production pipeline. What can be expected is that students will either apply tools you propose, adapt them, or they’ll come up with their own. Which tools they end up finding the most useful for the situation is unknown when you first start out teaching a PjBL course. Facilitating an understanding of how tools are applied in industry is another way to help them understand their use.
Medium
The type of technology students will be developing and how it might relate to a particular community of practice is another known unknown. This is because if you challenge them to solve a problem through the development of technology, it is hard to tell if Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, or another emerging technology will solve the problem the team and the client partner are attempting to identify and solve. Because of this, you will need to draw from expertise in the communities of practice you engage with, should students need more media-specific support than you are able to provide.
Access to equipment including powerful enough computers for students to complete their tasks may be known or a known unknown as enrollment numbers will influence budget. What you can’t predict is if students who enroll have a powerful enough computer to handle emerging tech development, particularly if they want to use a game engine. So how can this be resolved? One solution is to partner with an existing lab, library, or department unit that might provide you access.
Project
How long students remain within the phases of a project pipeline is unknown. While a carved out PjBL pipeline is proposed in Chapter 7, it is meant to be an adaptable template. You’ll never really be able to tell just how much time a student team will need at the different phases of production. This might impact the overall class progression influencing everything from intended learning outcomes to the final project deliverable.
The personality, work habits, and experience of the client partner if there is an external client can be unknown especially if you haven’t worked with them in the context of interfacing with students. Client relationships need to be managed and expectations of their involvement in a course need to be communicated up front, and if helpful, a signed agreement will help. Learners need clients particularly in the opening weeks of the project to ensure they are reading a brief correctly, checking in for changes, and confirming the features and the project itself. They need clients to give them feedback and to approve choices. Clients can easily fade after the initial excitement of kickoff, so planning a weekly meetup with remote communication in between classes is advised. Despite all the mitigation strategies you apply, however, you still cannot predict how the relationship between client, learner, and you will evolve.
Mentor
How much experience you have had developing emerging technologies is a known unknown for the course and the students. It is difficult to say whether less or more experience on production pipelines influence how well students receive your teaching and mentoring. Some of that is also dependent on the role(s) you played on those production teams. The varied types of experiences that you bring to a PjBL course will support you and learners when obstacles show up or problems occur. That said, you can’t predict them all. There’s nothing wrong in curating people with more experience to occasionally visit or provide feedback to the learners. Strategically, it makes learners feel a bit more connected to the local industry around them.
How much mentoring support you will need to provide students and teams is a known unknown in PjBL courses. When considering taking on a PjBL course, schedule in time ahead of the course and understand when some weeks might be challenging. Planning ahead will guide the time that you spend with learners and the project, in addition to understanding the boundaries you might have. Regardless of what you plot out ahead of time, there will still be moments where you feel a team needs more support, particularly if you are as deeply invested in their success as they are. Thus, a known unknown will be the mentoring load you will experience.
The connection the mentor has to a specific community of practice that values the integration of emerging technologies to solve human problems will be different for each industry, and even within the same one. A connection to a community of practice allows mentors and students the possibility of accessing professionals in the community who may offer workshops, further mentorship, and advice to learners. It opens the course to allow for a diversity of voices expanding the knowledge of learners and affirming the messages the mentor is teaching. That said, every time you teach a PjBL course, the community has likely evolved. New emerging technologies also play a role in the design process as well as the priorities of a community of practice.
Having some type of teaching assistant or other human resource support throughout the course may be unknown at first. It might really depend on the number of learners enrolled. Having a TA is important in a PjBL course because things happen quickly, and you need another set of eyes on everything to increase how much time you can give learners. It’s difficult to know how much time they’ll need or how large a class will be until your first class so it will be helpful to account for students needing more time if you have less support than you anticipated.
Learner Response
How much time students are willing to spend developing the project regardless of the course credit value. This in turn will affect how many features a project can consist of. This factor makes the difference as to whether a course outcome is a proof-of-concept project or a more developed minimum viable product. While you may have a good idea of the course hours and the expected work learners undertake each week, you can never really estimate the level of involvement that learners will commit to.
It is impossible to know before you start and in some cases during a course if the learning outcomes associated with the project co-construction process are being achieved by all students. Tying the competencies you want learners to develop through targeted activities may be one way to increase knowledge, and midsemester interviews can tell you a lot. Ultimately though, in PjBL, many of the learning outcomes are tied to the prototypes learners make and the process they undertake to co-construct them.
Relying on learning outcomes based on research and/or previous experience may be helpful but may need to be adjusted along the way. Knowing the research done previously on PjBL will help guide you in the first stages of designing your learning outcomes. Anticipate they will need to be adjusted depending on what learners you have in the course and what their learning goals are. Learning outcomes may need to be calibrated accordingly.
These are just some of the known unknowns that will influence any PjBL course focused on developing emerging technologies. Internal and external factors influence how the course is designed. When you look at the sum of all the factors you will need to consider prior to offering a project-based course, you quickly realize that there is no one way, how-to process, shortcut, or template that will work for every learning environment, every course, or every student.
To Do: Map Known Knowns and Known Unknowns
Two sets of charts for known knowns and known unknowns in the workplace, each with eight empty circular labels around it.
Visual model can be used to brainstorm known unknowns in the workplace that may map to a PjBL environment
How PjBL Reinvents How Teachers and Learners Interact
Because of the seemingly overwhelming number of known unknowns present in PjBL, and the various roles that instructors and learners play, these types of learning environments force a rethink of the teaching and learning interactions that students and instructors are more familiar with. PjBL challenges the most dominant method of learning where a large class of learners are expected to absorb facts, memorize the important ones, and regurgitate them when they are tested. Facilitating learners to co-construct projects in post-secondary institutions will be a bit of a shock to learners used to that type of passive learning model. PjBL follows a long history where instructor/learner relationships are not usually recounted since little has been written about specific use cases that occur across disciplines. More evidence-based research has been written about the advantages of PjBL in Kindergarten to Grade 12 environments, with authors advocating for the many benefits of integrating project and problem-based learning within courses. It is helpful to research some of the writing available at the end of this chapter, as generalizations that have been made might be applicable to post-secondary environments.
Mentoring Learners to Navigate Their Own Experiences
One of the most important affordances of PjBL is that it proposes an opportunity for instructors to mentor learners to manage their own learning goals, their collaborative relationships with each other, and all aspects of the project from inception to final deliverable. Instructors teach the tools that allow learners to manage these three intersecting characteristics of PjBL. They then mentor learners as these tools are applied to the project pipeline itself.
A chart lists things learners are mentored to manage. The project, personal and team.
Three areas students are mentored to manage within PjBL courses
Project
To manage projects, students need to learn the basics. They need to understand project management, timeboxing, when a task is considered complete, and a feature done. They need to know what an appropriate scope of the project is and receive feedback so they can assess what is good enough. All these experiences cannot be understood through lecture alone. Students need to be guided experientially while undertaking tasks related to building a project together and be able to manage their and their client’s expectations as well.
Individual
Assertions from research conducted within post-secondary institutions build on the many features of project courses and particularly on the capacity for PjBL to support self-regulation. Mentoring is key in supporting students to manage what they need to learn to deliver a project on time, with a limited set of features, and develop targeted competencies in the process. This is to the mentee’s benefit as their propensity to manage themselves, their learning, their time, their own problem-solving processes in a variety of digital media work environments will have a direct impact on their value as central participants in an organization. Similar to supervising a doctoral student, the act of mentoring involves the capacity to assess where an individual is at, what they need support with, and what obstacles they may need support in removing. That assessment then leads to feedback that is actionable—in other words, feedback that will continue to support students in their ongoing development and improvement of whatever it is they are building.
Team
Teams are composed of individuals, all of whom have various levels of experience collaborating with other individuals. In terms of managing themselves as a team, there is much to learn in practice. This includes basics about how to forge aligned values, how to enact Rules of Play, best practices in collaboration, which include offering and sharing ideas openly, communicated work ethic, etc. Ultimately, mentoring a team to manage themselves without too much interference is one of the goals in PjBL courses. This is not achieved through traditional teaching or doctoral supervision as each individual is contributing to the same project. Mentoring teams requires a delicate balance between supporting individuals and supporting the team itself. It requires the discernment to differentiate what would most benefit the team and the project at any given moment during a production period.
A Venn diagram illustrates two overlapping circles for self-regulation and monitoring. The overlapped area is labeled, mentoring self-regulation.
Mentoring self-regulation is one of the distinguishing actions that instructors of PjBL environments will engage in persistently
Chapter Summary
Becoming increasingly aware as to how you mentor in the workplace will be important to reflect on and capture as you read the next chapter.
Introduced core features of a project-based learning (PjBL) environment
Proposed that instructors relate to learners in multiple types of ways: through short lectures, demonstrations of tools, modelling an approach to design, and mentoring
Described a common intent that instructors play in a PjBL environment to guide learners to manage themselves, the project, and a client partner
Defined the potent combination of actions and approaches as mentoring
Revealed that in PjBL learners are exposed to a different kind of learning experience, one that is more experiential where they learn by doing
Suggested that learners will develop know-how applying the knowledge that you teach
Explained that the known knowns and known unknowns of PjBL in the development of emerging technology are well matched to instructors experienced with project development pipelines
Tools and Suggested Processes
Deepen understanding of common characteristics of PjBL.
Be aware that there are different roles instructors play in PjBL environments.
The way that students learn in PjBL can help provide variation in activities and assignments.
Recognize there are known knowns and known unknowns in PjBL.
Figure 1-4 shows three dominant areas where you can direct your mentoring.
Deeper Dive
English, M. C., & Kitsantas, A. (2013). Supporting student self-regulated learning in problem and project-based learning. Interdisciplinary journal of problem-based learning, 7(2), 6.
Hung, C. M., Hwang, G. J., & Huang, I. (2012). A Project-based Digital Storytelling Approach for Improving Students' Learning Motivation, Problem-Solving Competence and Learning Achievement. Educational Technology & Society, 15(4), 368-379.
Zimmerman, B. J. (2008). Investigating self-regulation and motivation: Historical background, methodological developments, and future prospects. American Educational Research Journal, 45(1), 166-183.
Project-based Learning
Lam, S. F., Cheng, R. W. Y., & Ma, W. Y. (2009). Teacher and student intrinsic motivation in project-based learning. Instructional Science, 37(6), 565-578.
Blumenfeld, P. C., Soloway, E., Marx, R. W., Krajcik, J. S., Guzdial, M., & Palincsar, A. (1991). Motivating project-based learning: Sustaining the doing, supporting the learning. Educational psychologist, 26(3-4), 369-398.
Jonassen, D. H. (1999). Designing constructivist learning environments. Instructional design theories and models: A new paradigm of instructional theory, 2, 215-239.
Ward, S., & Chapman, C. (2003). Transforming project risk management into project uncertainty management. International journal of project management, 21(2), 97-105.