Final Group Project-Collaborative project-based learning and problem-based learning in higher education

What if instruction could actually engage students and get them excited about learning? What if school could foster student creativity and support their expanding imaginations? What if educators around the world had the tools to provide students with the 21st century skills to imagine and create their own futures in our ever-changing global society?

Here, Macaroon will introduce you a new learning era.

To learn without thinking is blindness, to think without learning is idleness

--Confucius

The new learning fashion is--THINK WHAT YOU LEARN, PRACTICE WHAT YOU THINK, and certainly-- it is all about COLLABORATION.

Part One What Are They?

Project Based Learning

Project Based Learning is one of a number of educational approaches aimed at making learning more applicable to life outside the classroom. It asks students to engage with authentic, experiential questions and challenges them with thoughtfully designed projects and tasks. 

Project Based Learning emphasizes a number of skills that educators have generally agreed are essential for a “Twenty-first Century Education”.  Those qualities include: collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical-thinking.

Project Based Learning often involves groups of students working together to achieve a common goal. The collaborative nature of this style of learning offers all students an opportunity to leverage their strengths while diminishing their challenges.  Within a team, the group needs to agree on the plan and negotiation and decision-making needs to occur to determine the best solution for the project, and many negotiators describe their negotiation as win-win (Leigh L. Thompson, 2009). It also simulates the type of tasks that they will encounter outside of school involving group work, presentation skills, and information drawn from a variety of subject areas.

However, the project-based learning approach leads to a whole new problem-- conflict amongst students. Collective learning and self-directed learning in groups are made up of complex processes in terms of relationship and cooperation. Differences, arguments, debates and conflicts are inevitable in group- organized learning. Thus, the individual part of PBL will take “conflicts” as a research subject, discuss the types conflicts, namely task conflict, process conflict, and relationship conflict, and investigate their relationship with PBL learning efficiency.

Design-Based Learning

Basically, design-based learning is a particular form of project-based learning. It is an instructional learning approach, which students in engineering design embark upon.

 

Virtual-Based Learning

Virtual based learning that takes place within the distance-learning environment goes further in educating students for work in the 21st century. Virtual teams are teams that do not meet face-to-face and use computer-mediated communication. Students can be attending the same university from different geographical locations or be involved in multi-university projects. Students work with students from different cultures to achieve a common goal or accomplish a specific task. In most cases, the students have not known each other previously.

 

Part Two Shifts Analysis

Generally, there are three main SHIFTS in learning process

• From MASTERY to INQUIRY

Mastery takes as its goal a finished target. This might not always be its intent, but it is the implication whenever we say the goal is getting a student to the point where they or we can say they have “mastered” some content or skill. Such a goal does not invite a logical next step.

Contrastingly, inquiry takes as its goal a continuing cycle of attempting to find things out. Questions beget questions, which beget questions.

Mastery offers a way post of certainty in what can start to feel like an endless cycle of inquiry. For students who frustrate easily, this can be a relief, a respite that allows them to say, “I don’t have the answers I seek, and I know this for now.”

Inquiry with moments of mastery is an invitation to greater discovery founded in growing abilities.

 

• From ONE SHOT to LONG TERM

 One shot learning means that once a few categories have been learned the hard way; some information may be abstracted from that process to make learning further categories more efficient.[i]So time consuming on every single learning unit can be saved in this way. Every class contains large quantities of new knowledge and students learn basing on the existing foundation.

By contrast, project-based, design-based or virtual teams learning usually ask for longer time to conduct the teaching and learning issue. For example, in the design-based learning case, it took 10 weeks to complete a single project, which might only demand one class hour to accomplish in traditional learning course.

 

• From LESSONS to EXPERIMENTAL

 The mode of education was “lessons”, which means that us students accept education just through taking lessons. Teachers gave lessons to students in class, students got knowledge from textbooks and the teachers, the style of education might be more theoretical. And nowadays, the mode tend to change from “lessons” to “experiential” in many fields, which requires students focus on practicing but not just theories.

Part Three Changes That More than Shifts

Less of this		More of that
Driven by educator preference		Driven by student, educator, and system data
Individual learning		Collaborative team-based learning engaged in defined cycles of continuous learning to build deeper expertise, powerful lessons, and authentic and meaningful assessments
Large-group, formal, one-size-fits-all activities to build awareness and deliver content		Transformative learning experiences that replicate expectations for classroom practice
Occasional, episodic "adult-pullout" learning opportunities		Regularly scheduled learning opportunities as part of the work day and week
Low expectations or support for application of learning		High expectations for application of learning coupled with coaching and other forms of workplace support for implementation

Part Four Demandings and Benefits

COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION

• Communicate Clearly

 --Articulate thoughts and ideas effectively using oral, written and nonverbal communication skills in a variety of forms and contexts

--Listen effectively to decipher meaning, including knowledge, values, attitudes and intentions

--Use communication for a range of purposes (e.g. to inform, instruct, motivate and persuade)

--Utilize multiple media and technologies, and know how to judge their effectiveness a priori as well as assess their impact

--Communicate effectively in diverse environments (including multi-lingual)
 

• Collaborate with Others

--Demonstrate ability to work effectively and respectfully with diverse teams

--Exercise flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromises to accomplish a common goal

--Assume shared responsibility for collaborative work, and value the individual contributions made by each team member
--Ability in conflicts resloving

 

CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

• Think Creatively

--Use a wide range of idea creation techniques (such as brainstorming)

--Create new and worthwhile ideas (both incremental and radical concepts)

--Elaborate, refine, analyze and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and maximize creative efforts

• Work Creatively with Others

--Develop, implement and communicate new ideas to others effectively

 --Be open and responsive to new and diverse perspectives; incorporate group input and feedback into the work

--Demonstrate originality and inventiveness in work and understand the real world limits to adopting new ideas

--View failure as an opportunity to learn; understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes

--However, while most people would agree that teamwork promotes better decision-making (Amy Edmondson & Diana McLain Smith, 2008), differences, arguments, debates and conflicts are inevitable in group-oriented learning. Hence, it is very important that students do not take conflicts onto a relationship level, so as to achieve better learning results from conflicts in the learning process.

• Implement Innovation

--Innovation happens when different areas of knowledge or insight come together – sometimes in one individual’s mind, but most often sparked by two or more people working together (nGnera Corporation, 2009).

--Act on creative ideas to make a tangible and useful contribution to the field in which the innovation will occur

Part Five Global Forces Impact Analysis

We would like to analyze the impacts of global forces from two aspects, one is impetus, and another one is condition.

Impetus means the positive driving forces. Firstly, the demand on creative people ask for according change in education method, and project-based learning, design-based learning and virtual team learning benefit creativity growth so they are increasingly popular now. Secondly, notions like collaboration, team spirit are concerned by more and more people, the three new learning ways, as the excellent tool to nurture team collaboration, are widely used in schools’ educational application.

In terms of condition, which means, the factors that make project-based learning, design-based learning and virtual team learning possible while in the past, it is almost impossible to conduct it. First of all, we can find that the three new learning methods ask for high quality teachers, they usually have to have frontier and broad knowledge structure to deal with students’ problems. Luckily, nowadays, most teachers are educated better, they can access to abundant educational or theoretical resources easily, and schools also demand teachers to have a higher degree like a Master degree. Secondly, the information technology development also make it possible for project-based learning, design-based learning and virtual team learning. For example, project based and design-based learning take Internet as a main media to educate student, and virtual team learning is basically conducted and rooted in Internet.

Part Six Future Trend and Development

 

As a big picture, in the future development of team oriented project-based learning curriculum, conflicts should be put into consideration. Both academic staff and students need to understand
escalation process of conflicts. It is important to depersonalize conflict by ensuring that all parties do not judge each other and to focus the conflicts on the basic issues by concentrating disagreement on facts (Gordon L. Lippitt, 1982). In this way, they could use conflicts instead of being
messed up with conflicts.

 

Design-based learning spreads only after the 20th century and we believe that as a learning method, it will be more and more popular in the upcoming era. We feel like analysis from two aspects, weakening in obstacles and strengthening in driving forces. 

In terms of obstacles, that is, the high standards demanding on teachers’ quality, it is true that some teachers complain about that design-based classes are difficult to handle, and they have to learn more and gain more teaching experiences to handle with students’ problems and the teaching content. But we believe things would be easier in future, because teachers now are increasingly better educated, for example, in the past, a graduate with bachelor degree is qualified enough to teaching in middle school or high school, but now, at least in China, a master degree in usually necessary. Besides, young generation is more likely to learn new knowledge and welcome new teaching method.

Concerning the driving forces, the demand on creativity and collaboration skills ask for some new learning method like design-based leaning which cultivate this kinds of thing. Also, as for design-based learning need Internet or technical conditions to support the learning process, the development of IT and technology in the 21th century will provide greater opportunity for design-based leaning to grow.

With the development of technology nowadays, everything is moving on, especially the IT area, virtual team learning can be a tendency with its support. Technology makes the world smaller, distance learning is required, and virtual team can handle this condition. On the other hand, the old educational style is a little bit out of style, it may not catch up with the modern step, and the creativity and innovation are very important, virtual team is a relative new idea, we need this kind new thing to match the society.

From our perspective, virtual team learning can be a more and more popular learning method in the future. The current education style may not match the modern life rhythm, it requires modern teams finish assignments together quickly, but sometimes they cannot really get together, and that is why virtual teams are needed.

Furthermore, we have an expectation about virtual-based learning, which is to make the virtual experience becoming more and more “real”. With the level of technology becoming higher and higher, virtual-based learning will become more and more fantastic with the combination of future high technology. One day, having lessons at home but feeling exactly like studying at classroom with all the classmates around would not be a dream anymore.

 

References

 

Leigh L. Thompson. (2009). Win-Win Negotiation: Expanding the Pie.

nGnera Corporation. (2009). Business Opportunities through Collaboration.

Gordon L. Lippitt. (1982). Managing Conflict in Today’s Organizations. Training and Development Journal, July 1982.

Mehalik, M.M., & Schunn, C. (2006). What constitutes good design? A review of empirical studies of design processes. International Journal of Engineering Education, 22 (3)

McALLUM, KIRSTIE. (2013). Workplace Conflict: Three Paths to Peace. IESE Insight. Issue 18. 43

Jay A. Conger. (1998). The necessary art of persuasion. Harvard Business Review. 76 (3)

Ed Catmull. (2008). How Pixar fosters collective creativity. Harvard Business Review. 87 (1)