Quinsigamond Community College: Providing Recommendations for Project-Based Learning Implementations

Project Sponsor: Quinsigamond Community College

Quinsigamond Community College (QCC) is a public 2-year college located in Worcester, Massachusetts. QCC has provided an accessible, affordable, and high quality education to the residents of central Massachusetts since 1963, growing from an enrollment of 300 in 1963 to over 13,000 in 2018. To deliver on its mission of providing a high quality education, QCC offers over 120 associate degree and certificate career options to students. To continue to offer the best student learning environment, Ken Dwyer and the Quinsigamond Outcomes Research for Excellence team have partnered with WPI to introduce Project-Based Learning on campus.

QCC’s vision is to welcome and embrace its community, where faculty and staff drive to develop potential and help make dreams come true as the students come first. This can be seen in their mission statement: “At QCC, we excite…we ignite…we open new vistas of opportunity.” This vision is executed through their mission which is to provide an accessible, high quality, and affordable higher education to the residents of central Massachusetts. To fulfill this mission, the college follows its mission principles and values.

Student Researchers

Our IQP team consists of:

Christian Curll – Electrical and Computer Engineering

Nicholas Johnson – Computer Science and Robotics Engineering

Alana Keating – Business Management Engineering

Julia Saldanha – Civil Engineering

Our Project

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is a teaching method that allows students to improve their collaboration and research skills while engaging them with real world problems and situations. The overall goal of our project is to provide recommendations for different PBL implementations that will best suit the QCC community. To accomplish this goal, our team held interviews and conducted surveys to gather information and recommendations in PBL implementations. Using the information gathered our team provided recommendations for Project-Based Learning implementations to QCC.

Goals and Objectives

The goal of this project is to provide recommendations to Quinsigamond Community College (QCC) on how to implement Project-Based Learning (PBL).

To achieve this goal, our team accomplished the following objectives:

• Identified the practices commonly used to implement PBL in a Community Colleges setting
• Determined the extent to which PBL is used in classrooms at QCC and identified faculty utilizing PBL in their courses
• Began development of a PBL toolkit and framework for QCC
• Created and worked with PBL Champions
• Presented recommendations of PBL techniques to the QCC faculty and introduced them to the PBL toolkit

Final Report