A Corporate Example of Project Based Learning

Enough talking about how to design project based learning, let's get down to the brass tacks and look at an example of a PBL lesson. If you would like more information on project based learning before looking at an example please review my series of project based learning blog posts. This example is titled "Selling Sleep Disorder Relief" and was designed to help sleep products sales people improve their sales with customers suffering from sleep disorders. Most of the process is designed to be completed over the course of 6 days by groups of sales professionals within their store location during free time in between customers.

The process begins by the facilitator communicating the guidelines through email and will conclude with the participants meeting to perform the presentations. The email sent to participants at the beginning of the project will outline the guidelines of the project and provide access to the project web site which serves as a resource to participants throughout the project. The details of each step of the process are described in the table below.

Day	Milestone	Description
1	Project Begins	Project facilitator groups participants according to their store location and assigns each group a sleep disorder. This step of the process is initiated through an email from the facilitator describing the guidelines of the project and providing access to the project web site. Once groups are formed and assigned a sleep disorder, they can begin working on the project and contact the facilitator for assistance when needed. Because the project is able to be facilitated online there are less expenses associated with travel and time in a classroom.
2	Research	Groups begin researching symptoms of their assigned sleep disorder using multiple internet resources. Potential links are available in the Resources section of the project web site to help get participants started. However, they are encouraged to extend their research beyond the sites listed on the Resources page of the project site. Learners will develop a greater understanding for the information by conducting research on their own rather than being spoon fed the information.
2	Develop Outline	Groups develop an outline highlighting the key findings of their research and possible solutions for the customers sleep disorder. The outline will be submitted to facilitator for feedback. This allows the facilitator to provide formative feedback to the group before they potentially go too far down the wrong path.
3	Develop Handout	Groups will begin developing the handout after receiving feedback on their outline from the facilitator. The handout will be designed to summarize the key points and distributed during the presentation. This will serve as a job aid to other participants of the class who will be learning about the sleep disorders presented by the groups.
4	Develop Presentation	Groups develop their presentation including the role play sales presentation simulation. There will be an opportunity to receive feedback and practice the presentation in front of the facilitator. The opportunity to practice the presentation in front of the facilitator provides another opportunity for formative feedback to ensure they are headed down the right path and are grasping the instructional objectives of the lesson.
6	Perform Presentation	The groups will perform their presentations for the other groups and the facilitator. The handouts will also be distributed at this time. Performing the presentation in front of other class participants provides the opportunity for participants to demonstrate the performance described in the instructional objectives and for other participants to learn about the specific sleep disorder.
6	Debrief and Discuss	The facilitator will debrief and discuss the key points of each groups presentation using the handouts provided by each group of learners. These handouts will then be assembled by the learners to be used as a reference/job aid helping them take advantage of what they learned from other groups presentations. This and the final project grade are where summative feedback is given based off of the culminating project.

This is just one example of Project Based Learning in a corporate environment. Hopefully this example will give others ideas of how to get started and my series of project based learning posts will fill in the details of each step along the way. Do you have any examples of using project based learning in a corporate environment or suggestions of how to improve upon this example? If so please leave a comment with an example, suggestion, or have anything to say about project based learning.

Related Posts:
The posts listed below provide many more details regarding designing project based learning in a corporate environment.

• Project Based Learning - Are you doing it?
• What is Project Based Learning?
• 3 Steps to a Driving Question for Project Based Learning
• Designing Assessments for Project Based Learning
• Project Based Learning in 3 Steps
  

Moodle Reporting and User Management: Is MOOMIS the answer?

Moodle does a lot of things great, but site wide reporting and bulk user management are definitely not included in those great things. If you are a Moodle administrator for an organization I am sure you know the pain of having to go into each course site to produce grade reports for multiple courses. In my case, I have to send out a weekly report listing every users grades in every course they have taken on Moodle. This means I have to go into each course site and export a grade report to an excel spreadsheet and then merge all of those separate spreadsheets into one big grade report. To complicate things even more, I have to maintain separate groups within each course site so that users can be sorted by position or location. To my horror, if a user changes positions or locations I have to move them to a new group in each course site. When you have a lot of users and a lot of courses this can become a very time consuming process. This puts me in the position of desperately needing a Moodle plugin that will make it easy for me to export site wide reports, and manage site wide user groups rather than having to complete these tasks repeatedly in each course site.

What is MOOMIS?
My Moodle administration despair lead me into a search for some kind of plugin or modification that will help me overcome these challenges. I was surprised to find that there aren't a whole lot of options out there until a conversation with Barry Sampson led me to the open source option called MOOMIS by aardpress. Keeping in Moodle style MOOMIS is open source and an acronym for Modular, Object, Oriented, Managed, Intelligence, System. It's not just one plugin but a suite of the business tools listed below:

• Communication - Moodle already has messaging and email capabilities but it's nothing special. Moomis' communication tool adds a few bells and whistles so you can do things like send emails to groups and add attachments.
  
• Competency Manager - This looks like a great tool for regulated markets such as insurance or health care. The competency manager allows you to setup "competencies" that can be linked to job titles. Users then complete coursework to work toward achieving these competencies. When they do reach the competency level for their position they have verified that they are competent for their position.
  
• CPD (Continuous Professional Development) - This tool is key for creating site wide reports with Moomis' "Report Creator." Every course on Moodle needs a CPD which is awarded to the student for completing a course. When the user makes it to the end of the course they have to click on the CPD activity which will then award them a CPD for either achieving a certain score on a quiz or by clicking a box verifying that they have completed the course.
  
• Events Manager - The "Events Manager" allows you to allocate "Real World" events such as instructor led training to users without having to create a course site specifically for that event. This is a nice feature which makes it easier to integrate instructor led training with eLearning and track it all in one place. As a big advocate for "Blended" training programs this is a feature that intrigued me.
  
• Groups - The "Groups" feature had me drooling when I first started researching Moomis because of it's ability to create site wide reports. In my situation I am dependent on groups so that I can sort users by region or position when looking at the gradebook. This tool allows you to create site wide groups so that you can then create site wide reports sorted by those groups. I was hoping that this feature would save me from having to manage separate groups in each course site on Moodle.
  
• Performance Manager - The "Performance Manager" is appealing to us corporate folk because of it's ability to tie learning objectives in with business objectives. We all know that the key to proving ROI in training is to tie learning objectives to what the overall business is trying to achieve. The performance manager allows you to setup business objectives in Moodle and then link users and courses to those objectives. This tool makes it obvious which courses or learning objectives are contributing to achieving business objectives.
  
• Report Creator - This is where the rubber meets the road. The main goal I am trying to achieve is to find an easy way to create site wide grade reports and that is what the report creator is designed to do. The report creator allows you to produce reports in a variety of different formats listing CPD's awarded to users in all courses they have taken on the site. I was hoping this would save me a lot of time by not having to go into each course site to export a grade report and then merge all those together to create a site wide report

What MOOMIS doesn't do

Before diving in and installing MOOMIS so that I could take it for a spin I thought it was going to be the answer to all my problems. In particular, I was drooling over the "Groups" feature and the "Report Creator." Unfortunately these features don't quite work the way I was hoping for so I am going to have to continue my search for a plugin that will address my issues. However, MOOMIS does have potential and with some enhancements I think it could take the corporate world by storm. Here are my suggestions for MOOMIS that would make it the Moodle add on of my and I am sure many other Moodle administrators dreams.

• Groups - The idea of being able to manage groups site wide rather than course by course is fantastic. However, MOOMIS groups do not cascade down to the course sites. MOOMIS groups are great for creating MOOMIS reports but if you need to use separate groups for any course activities or to sort through the gradebook then you will still need to manage those groups on a course by course basis. MOOMIS groups are only helpful for MOOMIS tools such as the report creator and communication tools. I would love this tool if the MOOMIS groups automatically imported into each course site so that I could manage all groups from one spot instead of in each course site. Unfortunately, MOOMIS groups do not address the problem I was hoping to overcome because I still need to manage groups in every single course site.
• Continuous Professional Development(CPD) - Here's another great idea that just needs a little tweaking. CPD's work a lot like units for college courses. Students are awarded a specified number of CPD's for completing a course. My problem is with how course completion is determined. The only options for awarding CPD's are to automatically award the CPD for passing a certain moodle quiz or by having the student click a box verifying that they completed the course. This isn't ideal for me because I try to avoid quizzes and usually use other graded activities in courses such as Moodle lessons and SCORM modules developed with Adobe Captivate, but none of these activities are recognized by MOOMIS. If you are going to use any graded activity to determine completion it has to be a quiz on Moodle and can only be one quiz. Or else you can use the verification option where learners click a box to verify that they completed the course but I don't really trust my learners to not just scroll to the bottom of the course and click it no matter how engaging the eLearning course is. MOOMIS could overcome this option by awarding CPD's based off the "Total Score" in the course. This way you could ensure that learners completed all activities in a course because all of the activities contribute to the total score. It doesn't make sense to me to determine completion of a course solely on a final quiz rather than the culmination of everything the student has done in the course.
• Report Creator - I think the Report Creator would be great if CPD's were based off the courses total score. The report creator produces reports based off of CPD's, enrollments, or quiz scores, so really your only producing a report of what users have done on quizzes in each course. I was hoping that the report creator would produce reports based off of all activities including SCORM and Lessons but it does not. All MOOMIS needs to do to overcome this problem is to award CPD's based off of the courses total score.

In the end, MOOMIS isn't the answer to my issues at this time but I am happy to hear that they will be continuing to make enhancements and are actually coming out with a new release in January. If you are thinking about implementing MOOMIS you might want to wait until the new release in January. In fact, if you want to test out MOOMIS try doing it on a test version of Moodle or at least make sure you back up your database before installing it. Luckily I tested MOOMIS on my test version of Moodle which now has CSS problems. My columns are all over the place after installing it. I've included links below to the aardpress site describing Moodle and to the download on SourceForge. If you decide to try it out please let me know what you think of it or if you have any suggestions for overcoming the hurdles I described in this post.

Resources:

• Aardpress description of MOOMIS
  
• SourceForge download (Be Warned: Back up your Moodle first!)

Related Posts:

• Managing Users in Moodle
  

Project Based Learning in 3 Steps

An Instructional Designers "Cheat Sheet" for Designing Project Based Learning
Four blog posts ago I set out on a long strange trip to dissect project based learning in a corporate environment. Along the way I have received some great comments on this blog and through Twitter with insight and examples of how to take advantage of project based learning. For the last post of the Project Based Learning series I'm going to boil down the key points of the four posts and the comments I received into a "cheat sheet" for instructional designers getting started with project based learning. This "Cheat Sheet" is designed to be used as a job aid summarizing the project based learning design process and does not include all of the details you may be looking for. For more information please click on the links throughout the post or in the "More Information" section.

What is PBL and why should I care?
Based off the name "Project Based Learning", it's not so tough to figure out that it's all about learning through the development of a project. Although it is simple to understand the premise of Project Based Learning I believe there is a lack of resources available because many instructional designers are designing it but don't realize there is a name and method to it. So, what is PBL anyway? The textbook definition provided by the Buck Institute for Education in the "Project Based Learning Handbook" described PBL with the quote below:

A systematic teaching method that engages students in learning knowledge and skills through an extended inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed products and tasks.

In my opinion it's a flexible term that boils down to scaffolding a lesson so that learners construct their own solutions through the development of projects rather than being told what the solution is through formal instruction. Project based learning's focus on the learner constructing their own solutions using available resources is what makes it ideal for the corporate world. In the workplace, employees don't have their training facilitator there to give a lecture any time they come across a problem they don't know how to solve so it is important that employees learn to use available resources to solve the problem on their own. Project based learning achieves what a lecture cannot by providing the opportunity for the learner to practice using the necessary resources so that when they do come across a problem they are prepared to solve it on their own.

Step 1: Dream up the Big Idea
Before you can begin constructing the driving question you need to develop the "Big Idea" that the project will be based on. This is where you need to be creative and dream up an idea or theme for the project that is intriguing, complex, problematic, and most importantly requires the learner to demonstrate the outcomes of the instructional objectives being taught in the lesson. When it comes to project based lessons in corporate environments it's best to come up with a big idea or theme based off of problems that the learners face in the workplace. A big idea that matches what people do in their daily work makes it easy to design a project based lesson that will improve the learners performance on the job. A great way to stay focused on authentic concerns is to enroll the help of learners in the brainstorming process. Engaging the learners in the process of developing the big idea not only makes it easier to develop a "real world" concern, but it also ensures the learners "buy in" on the lesson.

Step 2: Develop the Driving Question
Once you have the big idea or theme for your project based lesson you are ready to develop the driving question. In this step you will be taking the big idea you dreamed up in step 1 and forming that into a realistic scenario requiring the learner to demonstrate the performance described in the instructional objectives. A great way to capture the "big idea" into the form of a problem is to present it as a realistic scenario that learners come across in the workplace. Think about what is going to happen on the job that will trigger the performance being taught and capture that in the form of a question or multiple questions. The driving question does not have to be told in a storyline but a good story is a great way to engage the learner while communicating the driving question(s) and guidelines of the project. Once you have an idea of what your driving question is going to be, ask yourself the questions below before committing to your final draft of the driving question(s):

• Is it open ended?
• Is it challenging?
• Is it realistic?
• Is it complex?
• Does it require a performance or project?
• Is it consistent with instructional objectives?

If you can answer yes to the questions above then your driving question may be ready to put into action. Once you have polished your driving question you are well on your way to a quality project based lesson.

Step 3: Design the Assessment
The project based learning design process concludes by developing a plan to assess whether learners are able to demonstrate the instructional objectives you set out for to begin with by completing one or more projects. You could say that this step puts the "Project" in "Project Based Learning." I consider this to be the most important part of the design process because it is where you evaluate whether the lesson was successful or not. The best practices described below will help you ensure a successful project based learning assessment.

• Demonstrates Objectives - A great way of ensuring that the assessments demonstrate the objectives is to design an assessment where learners complete the actual task or project that they will be required to complete on the job.
• Scaffolded Assesments - Scaffolding the project so that it builds up to a final assessment that represents a blend of all the content covered in the project ensures that the learners have improved over time and achieved the instructional objectives.
• Able to Score - Some of the greatest assessments for project based learning can also be the most difficult to assess. A great way of overcoming this obstacle is to create a rubric to use as a scoring guide. A well written rubric not only helps the facilitator score the assessment but it also helps the learner understand what is expected of them and serves as a guide for their project.

More Information:
As mentioned earlier, this post is only a summary of the design process. The links below will take you to more information regarding each step of the PBL design process.

• Project Based Learning - Are you doing it?
• What is Project Based Learning?
• 3 Steps to a Driving Question for Project Based Learning
• Designing Assessments for Project Based Learning
• A Corporate Example of Project Based Learning
  

References:

• Buck Institute for Education. (2003) Project Based Learning: A guide to standards focused project based learning. Novato, CA: Buck Institute for Education.

Designing Assessments for Project Based Learning

You have developed your big idea and polished the driving question, now for the most important aspect of Project Based Learning - planning the assessments. The project based learning design process concludes by developing a plan to assess whether learners are able to demonstrate the instructional objectives you set out for to begin with by completing one or more projects. I consider this to be the most important part of the design process because it is where you evaluate whether the lesson was successful or not. In this post I highlight some best practices that will help you ensure a successful project based learning assessment.

1. Demonstrates Objectives
It seems obvious that your project based learning assessment must require learners to demonstrate the performance described in the instructional objectives but it can be easy to become carried away with a creative project and lose sight of your goals. A great way of ensuring that the assessments demonstrate the objectives is to design an assessment where learners complete the actual task or project that they will be required to complete on the job. Yeah, it may seem boring to just have learners simulate what they have to do on the job but this is a great way to ensure that they have learned something that will truly improve their performance. If the learner comes back to work from the lesson with a task completed then you already have a return on investment to point to.

2. Scaffolded
It is often more effective to scaffold project based lessons to include multiple assessments or projects. I recently designed a project based lesson that gradually built on the learners skills by including an assessment at the beginning, middle, and end of the project. The assessments at the beginning and middle of the project provided the opportunity for a formative assessment where the learners can be given feedback as the project progresses, while the assessment at the end provided the opportunity for a summative assessment where the learners can be given a culminating appraisal of their performance. Scaffolding the project so that it builds up to a final assessment that represents a blend of all the content covered in the project ensures that the learners have improved over time and achieved the instructional objectives.

3. Able to Assess
Some of the greatest assessments for project based learning can also be the most difficult to assess. It's easy to give a test where each question is worth a certain amount of points but when it comes to assessments where learners are completing a project it can be difficult to measure exactly how well the learner performed. A great way of overcoming this obstacle is to create a rubric to use as a scoring guide. A well written rubric not only helps the facilitator score the assessment but it also helps the learner understand what is expected of them and serves as a guide for their project. Rubrics are a great tool that I think may be underutilized in the corporate world. There is a lot of information available that will help you create rubrics so I am not going to dive into the details here. The links below will take you to a couple of sites that will help you get started creating rubrics and to an example of a rubric I created for a project based lesson.

• Creating Rubrics - This link takes you to teachervision.com which has a variety of resources for creating rubrics.
• My Example - This link will take you to an example rubric that I created for a project based lesson.
• MS Office Template - This link will take you to a template for a rubric on the MS Office site.
  

These are just a few of the best practices that I have developed in the short amount of time I have been developing project based learning in a corporate environment and should by no means be considered an all inclusive list of best practices. I would love to improve upon the tips I have in this post with your suggestions. My next post will conclude the project based learning series by summarizing the posts into a "quick guide" for developing project based learning. If you have any ideas or tips that will help others maximize the effectiveness of project based learning please leave a comment so that others can benefit.

References:

• Buck Institute for Education. (2003) Project Based Learning: A guide to standards focused project based learning. Novato, CA: Buck Institute for Education.

Related Posts:

• Project Based Learning - Are you doing it?
• What is Project Based Learning?
• 3 Steps to a Driving Question for Project Based Learning
• Project Based Learning in 3 Steps
• A Corporate Example of Project Based Learning