{"id":72,"date":"2017-01-10T12:54:35","date_gmt":"2017-01-10T12:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/?p=72"},"modified":"2021-03-16T16:56:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-16T16:56:14","slug":"keep-it-real-success-in-project-based-learning-part-i-what-is-pbl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/2017\/01\/10\/keep-it-real-success-in-project-based-learning-part-i-what-is-pbl\/","title":{"rendered":"Keep it Real: Success in Project-Based Learning, Part I: What is PBL?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Untitled

Dr Jamie Barras, Informatics Teaching Fellow at King’s College London<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

\u201cI\u2019m a big believer in learning by doing\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a big believer in learning by doing.\u00a0 That\u2019s why I\u2019ve joined the team who are bringing Project-based learning (PBL) to the 2017 King\u2019s Summer School with the module Engineering: Creating Technologies that Help People<\/a>.\u00a0 In PBL, students, generally working in small groups, are presented with a problem to solve or task to complete and allowed to work out for themselves the best way to go about doing that \u2013 including what knowledge they will need to acquire in order to succeed.\u00a0 The instructor acts primarily as an advisor and support, stepping in to guide the student(s) only if they lose their way.<\/p>\n

PBL has many attractions; it allows students to take ownership of their learning experience, encourages a broad-based approach to acquiring skills both technical and non-technical and fosters a co-operative outlook to making progress, attributes that are particularly relevant to engineering as a discipline.\u00a0 The benefits are often contrasted with the characteristics of lecture-based learning, as in the table below, taken from a 1996 paper1<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

\"table<\/a><\/p>\n

Activities have a strong practical basis and are often \u201clab-based\u201d, while teaching is primarily through the medium of the \u201cround-table\u201d tutorials organised and led by the students themselves with the help\/presence of faculty advisors\/mentors.\u00a0 Projects proceed through a number of steps, the most-common expression of which is the so-called \u201cMaastricht Seven Steps\u201d of PBL2<\/sup>:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Clarify and agree working definitions, unclear terms and concepts<\/li>\n
  2. Define the problem and agree which phenomena require explanation<\/li>\n
  3. Analyse the problems (brainstorm)<\/li>\n
  4. Arrange explanations into a tentative solution<\/li>\n
  5. Generate and prioritise learning objectives<\/li>\n
  6. Research the objectives through private study<\/li>\n
  7. Report back, synthesize explanations and apply new information to the original problems<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Research on the impact that PBL has on student\u2019s education is on-going, but completed studies point to students who follow a PBL-centred curriculum retain knowledge longer and gain a deeper understanding of a subject than those who learn only through information transfer; they also develop better problem-solving and collaborative skills.\u00a0 We\u2019re hoping that\u2019s what the students who take our summer school module will discover too.<\/p>\n

    In my next blog post I\u2019ll discuss some of the challenges with PBL \u2013 and the solutions we\u2019ve come up with.<\/p>\n

    References<\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Lutz and Schachterle \u201cProjects in Undergraduate Engineering Education in America<\/a>\u201d European Journal of Engineering Education (1996) 21, 207 \u2013 214.<\/li>\n
    2. Taken from \u201cAn Introduction to Project-Based Learning<\/a>\u201d, Maggi Savenn-Boden, Coventry University Publications<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      \u201cI\u2019m a big believer in learning by doing\u201d I\u2019m a big believer in learning by doing.\u00a0 That\u2019s why I\u2019ve joined the team who are bringing Project-based learning (PBL) to the 2017 King\u2019s Summer School with the module Engineering: Creating Technologies … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":345,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10,14,11,13],"tags":[29,3,4,24,6,15,5,7,8,9],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-kings-college-london","category-london","category-summer-school","category-teaching","tag-engineering","tag-kings-college-london","tag-kings-summer-programmes","tag-project-based-learning","tag-summer","tag-summer-at-kings","tag-summer-school","tag-teachers","tag-teaching","tag-teaching-practice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/345"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":378,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/summertimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}