In Chapter 6, Developing Cohort-based Courses with Teacher-student Interaction, we affirmed that when developing courses that are cohort-based and include teacher-student interaction, it's very important to maintain clarity with respect to course organization and also to establish excellent communication.
Similarly, in student-centered project-based courses, it's important to maintain clarity and good communication. It's also important to keep things as straightforward and simple as possible in terms of the activities you'll ask your students to do. After all, it can be complicated and confusing in the online environment if you have too many places to go and things to do at the same time.
In this chapter, you'll learn how to best set up a student-centered project-based course. We'll focus on a few key components you can use for a successful course and also review open source applications that students can use when they collaborate to create documents, audio files, presentations, and videos. Our goal is to help you, as an instructor, administrator, instructional designer, or Moodle support to quickly and easily design and launch courses.
In this chapter, we'll discuss the following topics:
- Configuring global settings for student-centered project-based courses
- Selecting the best theme
- Choosing the best activities and resources
- Ensuring that the activities are connected to the assessments
- Selecting open source applications for students to use when creating collaborative projects
- Configuring the course to allow effective instructor and peer feedback
The traditional face-to-face college course is a cohort course and has a fixed number of students who progress together to complete it, and they're led by an instructor who guides them and also provides feedback and assessment on student projects.
Online courses can be very similar. The only difference might be that there are more ways to communicate with each other since you're working in an online environment, and the students may be working together for one class or taking a series of classes together.
Here's an example: In order to prepare students to work together in the global, distributed workplace of today, Centennial University's College of Business has built-in collaborative projects in all their online courses. In the Leadership and Strategic Thinking course, for example, students must collaborate to analyze a business situation and create a presentation as well as documents, an audio version, and a video. While it is possible to modify a course shell from a regular instructor-led cohort course, it is a complex process. So, to optimize the experience for the users and improve the course functionality, a new shell is created for all courses so that they are ideal for collaborative projects.
When considering how to configure the course, the Centennial University online team meets with instructors, instructional designers, instructional technologists, and the Moodle administration team. Before they create the shell, they need to review the main attributes.
The main characteristics of student-centered project-based online courses include the following:
- A common start and end date
- A clear timeline, with milestones
- Collaborative activities that involve students working together in groups
- Accessible feedback from peers and instructors
- A space for students to share files and edit each other's files
- Projects that require students to learn new skills and achieve higher standards of quality (audio editing, image editing, incorporating geographic information, and so on)
Student projects can take many forms, or include portfolios. The key feature is that there are many different versions that are built over time and constant review and revision allows one to build on prior knowledge and develop self-awareness.
Note
You can learn more about learning portfolios in The Learning Portfolio: Reflective Practice for Improving Student Learning at http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/resources/upload/learningportfolio_000.pdf.
The key to success in a student-centered project-based course is performance and interaction between students and the instructor.