Despite the Pandemic, Project-Based Learning Thrived

While COVID-19 had a grip on institutions of all kinds, including higher education, it didn’t succeed in dampening interest in WPI’s signature approach to education: project-based learning (PBL). In fact, some might argue the challenges posed by the virus only heightened interest in this pedagogy rooted in hands-on learning.

Applications for the university’s 2021 Institute on Project-Based Learning were in the double digits. Of the 22 teams from 20 colleges who enrolled, only two were from New England. Educators in Africa reached out to WPI during the pandemic for help on how to deliver remote education using PBL, and many students, despite not being able to travel to project centers due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, completed high-impact Interactive Qualifying Projects (IQPs) remotely. And faculty in WPI’s Great Problems Seminar found creative ways to keep project-based learning going despite the pandemic.

“We’ve been impressed by the interest in PBL during the pandemic,” says Kristin Wobbe, co-director of the university’s Center for Project-Based Learning, “but that interest should not be surprising because PBL translates well to an online environment and engages students in ways that traditional classrooms do not.”

“It’s been challenging for students and faculty to complete IQPs remotely, but we met that challenge and it has made us stronger going forward,” says Kent Rissmiller, former dean ad interim of The Global School. “The Global Projects Program was designed to support off-campus project work, and we’ll get back to that, but we now have more resources for communicating with project sponsors and engaging global problems in many places without travel.”

In April 2020, for example, students who had been scheduled to work on site at the Bucharest, Romania, Project Center, instead worked remotely on IQPs focused on promoting eco-tourism, raising awareness on pollen allergies, saving urban green spaces, redesigning inter-generational learning centers, and promoting collaborations through the American Chamber of Commerce in Romania.

After learning that few African universities had the resources needed to provide remote learning to their students, Provost Wole Soboyejo and 16 WPI faculty and staff members joined forces with nearly 4,000 colleagues at more than 100 universities across the African continent to develop a three-phased approach—including creation of an online institute—to train African educators how to create online education programs.

WPI used the insight it gained from its own experience of switching from classroom learning to remote learning to help these African universities meet their immediate and long-term educational needs. The university also relied on its own tried-and-true approach to global problem-solving: collaborating with local communities to define issues and co-produce solutions that work for the people who use them.

“We learned of this need and reached out to our global partners in Africa, offering to work with them to co-create a successful solution so that they would have the resources available to continue educating their students during the pandemic,” Soboyejo says. “This kind of work is a trademark of WPI’s approach to having direct impact on the world’s great problems and improving the quality of life of people across the globe.”

A research paper by Sarah Wodin-Schwartz, associate teaching professor of mechanical engineering, Kimberly LeChasseur, research and evaluation associate, and Caitlin Keller, instructional designer, speaks to the positive outcomes of PBL observed in Wodin-Schwartz’s classroom during the pandemic.

The paper is based on Hands-On Learning Days that Wodin-Schwartz used in her Introduction to Statics course, which was taught remotely. The paper titled, “Hands-On Learning Days (HOLD) In a Remote Introduction to Statics Classroom Environment,” describes the process of having students create physical systems demonstrating statics concepts at work. While such activities would normally be done in a classroom, during remote learning, the students carried them out using materials found at home. The research showed that these hands-on projects helped students who might otherwise have struggled with just Zoom-session lectures or reading assignments, she says.

“The findings in this study serve as a means of testing whether active learning components are valuable to students during remote learning in a crisis situation,” the report states. “Faculty face the decision of whether doing such activities from home without direct access to lab materials and under extremely stressful life circumstances is asking too much of students. Whether students will engage in this type of active learning and whether doing so is valuable are hypotheses that can be examined empirically. The findings from this study suggest that it is possible to engage students and have them learn a great deal from such learning activities.”

LeChasseur notes, “Different people learn in different ways. I think there are a lot of students who find the hands-on aspect of what Sarah does to be more intuitive and to really reinforce the conceptual ideas.”