Summary
Projects in your course ensure students leave with a meaningful artifact and put their learning into practice.
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.
Projects can be short 10-15 minute commitments where students reflect prior to or after a workshop. Or, they can be capstone projects that bring together everything students have learned into one significant achievement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Present: Students showcase their work. Students can present in live sessions (e.g., 'Demo Day') or via recorded videos posted to the community.
Example: mapping course outcomes to projects
Let's imagine you are designing the projects for these outcomes:
The questions you'd ask yourself as you're designing the course projects:
"How will students practice and apply what I'm teaching?"
"How will I know students have mastered this outcome?"
Your answers to these questions will help you determine what you ask students to submit as a project.
Here's what that could look like:
The capstone: "Design & Deploy Your AI Research Pipeline"
Project type: Create + Present
Prompt: Students pick a real research question from their own work and build a working agentic workflow around it (using Claude Code, Codex, or n8n) that includes at least one specialized agent (interviewer, analysis, or synthesis) and, where relevant, a synthetic user component grounded in real data. They deliver a working demo plus a short "judgment memo": what they automated, what they kept human, and why.
Where it lives: Final module, presented on a live Demo Day or posted as video to the community. Presenting to the community this directly hits the "lead advanced AI research initiatives" outcome, since explaining trade-offs to a room is exactly the stakeholder-communication skill the course teaches.
Due date: End of course.
Checkpoint projects feeding into it (due earlier in the syllabus or done during live sessions):
"Where Would You Trust an Agent?" (Reflection, early module): Students map a real workflow from their job and mark which steps they'd hand to autonomous execution vs. keep human-supervised. This scaffolds up to the judgment memo later.
"Build a Synthetic User" (Step-by-step + Create): Students build one synthetic user from actual research transcripts (not a generic persona), then write a one-paragraph guardrail note for a stakeholder on when this synthetic user is and isn't trustworthy.
"Two Agents, One Task" (Practice): Stand up two specialized agents (e.g., interviewer + synthesizer) on a small task and document what multi-agent collaboration actually added versus just made messier.
"Pipeline Audit" (Step-by-step): Students map their end-to-end research process and flag which stages are automation-worthy vs. better left manual. This becomes direct input into the capstone's scope.
Instructor View
Maven makes it easy to:
Create project prompts. Add projects to your course syllabus.
Track student work. We'll send a notification email when you have project submissions to review.
Facilitate peer feedback. Students will submit projects publicly (with the option to submit only to you) to encourage peer feedback.
Give personalized feedback. Use Maven's community features to comment on project submissions or provide short looms.
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, you'll see their submission in the Student Home view.
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
Can I assign a grade or score to projects through Maven?
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.
Are projects required?
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.
How many projects should I have in my course?
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.
How do I give feedback on a project?
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].