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The benefits of project-based courses and how to create projects in your Maven course

Chelsea Wilson avatar
Written by Chelsea Wilson
Updated over a week ago

Summary

  • Projects in your cohort based course ensure students leave with a meaningful artifact.

  • Projects help students demonstrate and solidify their learnings.

  • The Maven syllabus houses all your course projects and student submissions.

  • Students can automatically share projects to the entire cohort community for peer feedback.

What are projects?

Projects help your students apply the skills, concepts, and methods they learned in class so they can walk away with something concrete. Projects are a key reason why cohort-based courses can be more effective than self-paced learning. They offer the structure and accountability for your students to create useful artifacts for work and life.

Maven strongly recommends adding projects to your syllabus. Projects can be short 10-15 minute commitments where students reflect prior to or after a workshop. Or, they can be collaborative capstone projects that push students to work as a team.

Each project should connect directly to your course learning objectives. Here are the most common project types. You can mix and combine these to develop unique and impactful projects.

  1. Reflection: Students respond to an open-ended question to facilitate deeper thinking. They could write their response, share it in the community, or record a video.

  2. Step by step: Students solve a problem using a framework or template. This is great for reinforcing a framework or guiding students through a complicated process.

  3. Practice: Students repeat a skill to master it. This is useful for skills that benefit from repetition until you hit a certain threshold for mastery like: kicking a soccer ball 100x, practicing your scales on the piano, or typing until you hit a words-per-minute goal.

  4. Create: Students put their learning into practice, connect it to their work or life, and develop an original work. For example, if you were teaching a data visualization with Tableau course, you might ask your students to create a Tableau dashboard using publicly available datasets.

  5. Present: Students showcase their work. Students can present in live sessions (e.g., 'Demo Day') or via recorded videos posted to the community.

Instructor View

Maven makes it easy to:

  1. Create project prompts

  2. Track student work

  3. Facilitate peer feedback

  4. Give personalized feedback

Project setup

In the Syllabus editor, add a project to a module.

Give your project a title, write the prompt, and add a due date.

Review student projects

Once students submit their projects, check out the Submissions tab of your admin dashboard to view all the submitted projects.

Click View in Channel to respond to their post in the community. Because a student can share their work publicly, you can facilitate peer feedback by encouraging them to comment on each others' work.

Student View

The Maven student portal will be your students' one-stop-shop to view and submit projects and provide peer feedback.

What students see

Students will see each project nested within the syllabus modules. They can draft their project submission right in the Maven portal. Drafts will be saved automatically so students can come back to their work later. With one click, students will submit their projects for your review and have the option to publicly share to the community for peer feedback.

Once a project is posted to the project channel in your community, students can give and receive peer feedback by replying to the post. Encouraging peer feedback helps reinforce concepts and create a lively community.

FAQs

  1. Can I assign a grade or score to projects through Maven?

    1. There isn't a way to score a project or add a grade in Maven, but if you'd like to score projects for your course on your own rubric, you can. It's not a requirement to give a Maven course a completion score or grade. If you do want to provide students feedback on a rubric, you can always share an attachment or copy and paste the rubric in your response to their project submission.

  2. Are projects required?

    1. No, projects aren't required, but they are strongly encouraged. Projects help make learning real and contextual. A huge benefit of cohort-based courses is the tangible items (artifacts) that students walk away with.

  3. How many projects should I have in my course?

    1. This will likely depend on the learning objectives for your course. A good rule of thumb is ~1 hour of projects per week of your course. If your course is 2 weeks, that would translate to 2 projects that take 1 hour each to complete.

  4. How do I give feedback on a project?

    1. When students post to the project channel, you can give feedback in the thread via comments, reactions, or a recorded video (like Loom).

If you have additional questions about setting up projects for your course, please email [email protected].

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