I'm sitting here with Andy Brown, who's one of the people who heads up a lot of
our education initiatives here at Udacity.
And in fact, not long ago, Andy was kind of lead on transitioning a lot of what
we do at Udacity to a more project-based approach, to have students completing
projects as part of their experience and learning different skills.
So, thank you so much for talking to me today,
Andy, about project-based learning.
>> Yeah, thanks for doing this.
>> So the first thing I want to ask, and I think this comes up a lot when we're
dealing with teachers who want to do a project-based approach, but
are very stretched for resources.
Is that project-based learning, at least in my opinion,
is much more difficult to implement in a classroom than some traditional
instruction of just lecturing or giving material straight away.
Is it worth the extra effort, and if so why?
>> Yes, it's absolutely worth doing project-based learning.
And now that there's all sorts of free resources online there's a lot of free
time, potentially, for instructors to be spending their time coming up with and
helping their students as they go through these project activities.
There's lots of great explanations, lots of great sort of static resources out
there that, they're going to solve a lot of the sort of, what am I going to say?
How am I going to explain this topic?
And, in fact to me that's not the interesting part of the teaching.
The interesting part of the teaching is how am I going to shepherd
this person along as their brain transforms, and
that's best done through an authentic project.
So, yes it's totally worth it.
It is hard.
>> But it's getting easier.
>> Yeah.
>> This is your job if you've signed up to it.
>> Exactly, I think I've always had the idea that you just referred to of
basically building a course around all these awesome free materials that
are available online.
Because there's so much out there that wasn't out there before, and
that led to this class which is an entire class based largely around
the materials that are already free online.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel and represent things that have
already been presented very well, let's just see if we can leverage it and
spend our time on kind of the more student-focused, mentoring and feedback.
Speaking of feedback, so
one thing that's very difficult I think in project-based learning is assessment.
When, you know, I have a bunch of students who all do the same
math problem.
I know what the correct answer is.
I know what the steps are.
And, it's very easy for me to go through and say, you screwed up step two,
you screwed up step four.
>> But so what.
What do you know when you've done that?
>> Yeah, that's true.
But yeah assessment in projects is more difficult, isn't it?
It's a little more open ended.
>> It is but it's getting more towards what you actually want to be measuring.
So yes it's very easy to measure my,
some students ability to factor ten polynomials correctly.
It's just not a very interesting measurement.
Every now and then you'll find things that can be assessed that way.
Or really it's very important to know these facts before you can move on.
But I'm guessing that if you as an educator ask yourself,
what do I really want?
How do I want to change my students with this learning experience I'm crafting?
You'll find it's really hard to phrase that in terms of some
multiple choice questions or anything like that.
And this is especially
a danger when you're doing online project based learning.
Because multiple choice questions are by far the easiest things to do online.
Right, wrong, tally up a score.
You have a little green progress bar and it works.
But that experience just is never going to be even close to what you can
get if you try to do the project based learning.
>> Yeah, exactly.
And I think that we have, many of our courses, not our courses, but
courses that are currently available online, or
built around these multiple choice tests.
But you have exactly that,
where often times they have repeatability built into them.
Which is great, because you learn from your failures.
You get problems wrong, you move forward and learn.
But when you have only a small set of possible answers,
what you're really learning is that c isn't the answer to that question.
You're not learning the deeper understanding of what's going on there.
But for a teacher who has dealing with, for example in our class,
possibly a 100 different projects, all of which need feedback.
Are there any strategies to how to give feedback in
such a way that students can actually improve on it while doing
the project as opposed to just finding out at the end that they already failed.
>> Yeah, if you can bake feedback into the nature of the project itself.
So an example for building an HTML, a webpage let's say.
If you don't know anything about programming, sorry!
If you're building a webpage and I say build a webpage that looks like this and
I give you a little image that looks like a webpage.
The feedback is pretty natural,
the feedback is like well it doesn't look like that anymore,
you don't need the instructor to come tell you that, the student knows it.
And then if you can set up systems of feedback within students,
you'd be amazed the things that can happen when you
do the terrifying thing of stepping back as an instructor and
just letting your students screw up and sort of screw up together.
That can be a really amazing learning experience.
There has to be some constraints placed on that, but you can do it really well.
So, yeah, if you find yourself staying up until 4 AM, frantically grading
100 projects, it's probably not ideal, and you're probably killing yourself.
[LAUGH] So, you're probably not giving the best feedback to your students that
you could, because nobody could do that And
there's probably a more creative solution that will be just as good.
>> Yeah, it sounds like there are a lot of ways that we can go about that,
like giving exemplars that a student can, on their own,
compare their assignment to some exemplar.
And see where it's different and where it's similar, maybe
building in some automated assessment through some artificial intelligence.
Not just that question was wrong, but
something a little bit deeper about the real nature of learning.
And then let the peers give them feedback on it.
I think we often learn best from people who are going through the same struggles
that we're going through.
But you mentioned doing this in the context of web design.
I think you're exactly right that we often talk about project based learning,
the context of computer science because professionally,
what we do in computer science is mostly projects.
What about some other fields like accounting or
nursing or, can't think of another field.
But other fields where,
it's not necessarily a project based on what you actually do.
Can project based learning be used there?
Or is there something that can be done that kind of perpetuates the same
philosophical underpinnings of project based learning.
>> I think those fields are still project based, actually.
I think. I think we've overloaded this word,
project.
In computer programming, project can be what you call the thing you're working
on on the side, this cool webpage you're building.
In project-based learning, the word project means something very specific.
It means an authentic task, an extended task, so
it won't be completed in a single day.
It's sort of loosely defined, so there's room for creativity.
And the nurse who is monitoring my blood glucose levels, that's a project.
The accountant who's doing my taxes, if anyone who wants to do project-based
learning and do my taxes, that'd be good.
>> [LAUGH] >> But that's a project, right?
That's an authentic thing.
Like balancing the books on this company, that's an authentic thing.
So I think projects are there, if you can find them.
>> Yeah. >> And if they're not,
a computer's probably doing that job already.
>> That's true. That makes a lot of sense that we,
you know, in pure sense we talk about projects because it's something where
I create the idea, I implement it, I execute it and I deliver it.
But you're exactly right, a project can be anything on going.
It's got some investment in it, but doesn't necessarily have to be
completely open to whatever the student want's to specify.
So, this is an educational technology class and so we're really looking for
the ways that we can use technology to enhance education.
Maybe the learning process or maybe education as a broader community.
So specifically on the technology front, are there things that technology let's
us do in project based learning that are difficult to do in person?
>> Let me start by saying the things
that technology tempts us to do that we would never do in person.
And that's the things like the radio button quizzes.
The sort of like, oh, I know how to do a project, and I'm going to have 10 check
box quizzes that I'll ask about how much would you
put in this box of my tax return if you're doing the account in the example.
That's not authentic.
Nobody thinks it's authentic.
It's not fun.
It's not a good product base learning.
It's a very, like, superficial substitute.
And, it's really tempting to do because it's so much easier than anything else.
The things that the Internet give you.
The Internet gives you scale and it gives you access, so.
I mean it gives you the chance to have people from across the country,
across the world, working together on a task at any hour.
That's pretty cool.
>> Yeah. >> But, it's a lot of work to set up,
and there's a lot of ways it can go wrong.
>> [LAUGH] >> So, [LAUGH] I mean,
there's tradeoffs for sure, but still,
it's a better way of learning, if you can find a way to make it work.
>> Yeah. Makes sense, and
I think that technology gives us a lot of ways to,
exactly what you're saying, make it a little bit more open.
That it's not necessarily something that has to happen within the confines of
the one hour lecture that we have set aside for this class three days a week.
It's something that can happen at three o'clock in the morning
when I just happen to be online and a student asks a question.
Or you know there's a project to review and
I can watch their progress live which I really have difficulty doing in person.
At Georgia Tech we actually have some classes that have tried to implement
that approach.
Where students will come to a lab and there's no lectures or anything
like that, but there is set-aside class time that they're expected to be there.
And the idea is sit there,
work on your project, and someone will be in the room to give you feedback.
But that's a pretty big pragmatic constraint of they have nine hours
a week where they're required to be in the studio working on a project.
During that time.
And now we also have a person who has to be there during that time,
whereas the Internet allows us to do that a little bit more asynchronously.
Because it makes the classroom unlocked 24/7.
So do you have any final thoughts for
our students who are both engaging in project-based learning in this class,
and may also be trying to develop tools that facilitate project-based learning?
>> Yeah well, if you're going through this class, which is itself an example
of project-based learning, reflect on what's going well and what's not.
There's learning to be done just in that.
When you go on to try to do project-based
learning in your own classroom.
It's hard.
You're not going to get it right to begin with.
The bad version will still probably be better than if you hadn't tried,
but it's going to feel chaotic and
sort of out of control really, out of your control.
And that's sort of the nature of project-based learning, is the student's
gain more autonomy, which is a lot of the reason why we do it.
So stay reflective.
Next year will be better.
And the next year will be better than that.
And this is how we improve at our craft.
>> This is how I justify what I said at the beginning of this course.
Which is that there are some things that we'll do in this course that will
fail miserably.
See now I have an expert saying that's okay.
So. Thank you so much for
talking with us today, Andy, and for your perspective.
And thank you all.