Exploring the Integration of Project-Based Learning Approaches Into MOOCs

• In Event: 81.025 - Innovating MOOC Pedagogies

Abstract

Objectives
Project-based learning (PBL) integrates instructional activities within projects where students drive investigations of substantive questions (Krajcik & Blumenfeld, 2006). PBL is popular in classrooms, but there are questions of its utility in other settings, especially in Massive Open, Online Courses (MOOCs). MOOCs have settled into a didactic, lecture-based format with instructional videos, quizzes and activities, discussions, and graded assignments. This mirrors many traditional higher education classrooms, but some say that MOOCs could benefit from other pedagogical approaches (e.g., Eisenberg & Fischer, 2014). Our primary objective is to explore the extent to which MOOCs can employ PBL features (i.e., are PBL approaches viable?) and the potential learning benefits of a PBL MOOC (i.e., are some PBL features more or less successful in a MOOC?).

Perspectives
There is limited work on PBL MOOCs (e.g., Verstegen et al., 2015), and this work involved minimal PBL features. Early PBL literature informs our work. Blumenfeld et al. (1991) outlined a series of PBL tenets that drive our PBL MOOC development, including:
• A central "driving question" to situate and drive student activity
• Student support in problem-solving activities as students explore their topic (i.e., instructional and scaffolding units)
• Collaboration tools for students to discuss their work with peers and educators
• Feedback mechanisms during student creation and sharing of external artifacts used to express a project solution and to describe student understanding

Methods & Data Sources
We adopt a design-based research (DBR) approach (e.g., Collins et al. 2004) to develop a PBL MOOC about Computational Thinking (CT) for high school and undergraduate learners. The goal is to teach different CT practices: identifying and decomposing high-level problems, finding patterns for potential solutions, abstracting out unnecessary details from proposed solutions, and considering algorithmic approaches (e.g., Denning, 2017). The PBL MOOC incorporates a project where learners engage in CT to identify and explore a problem within a specific domain (i.e., disaster preparedness). Learners draw from information in embedded CT lectures and case studies describing how domain experts use CT. Our DBR process guided how we iteratively developed: the overarching project, the CT instructional and scaffolding elements supporting students, and productive feedback and collaboration mechanisms guiding project iterations.

Results
We explore the PBL MOOC pedagogical design by portraying the "effects with/effects of" the MOOC (Salomon et al., 1991) through representations of course structure and pedagogies (Authors, 2018). "Effects with" data sources include: logged learner work activity illustrating how learners interact with different MOOC elements, metrics for the different artifacts learners create to see how their work evolves, learner collaborative dialogues, etc. "Effects of" data sources involve pre/post tests and other measures of learner CT knowledge.

Scientific or Scholarly Significance
Our study is an example of how different pedagogical formats can expand didactic MOOC formats, and presents an overview of pros/cons from design and learning perspectives. As MOOCs continue to expand to more domains and academic credentialing, a “one size fits all” approach for MOOCs should give way to other pedagogical approaches for different educational settings.

Authors

• Chris Quintana, University of Michigan

• Darin B. Stockdill, University of Michigan

• Rebecca M. Quintana, University of Michigan

• Jeffrey Christopher Bennett, University of Michigan