Should Project-based Learning evolve?

Project-based Learning (PBL), in its various forms, has many benefits, not least that it puts application at the heart of learning and allows learners to connect their knowledge more effectively to their lives. But I came to appreciate it from another angle altogether: sitting in the classrooms of a top university, as a mature immigrant who spoke English as a second language, I have come to see how much one takes for granted in traditional university education and how subtle, unintentional exclusion can work. Projects, particularly those that allowed me to work with my peers, enabled me to learn differently, with my eagerness and work ethic making up much of the cultural deficit I initially faced. Thereafter, I have consistently been an advocate, dedicating my entire career to exploring and refining it.

Because it does need perfecting! My work in PBL usually involves two kinds of negotiation: one with educators who think PBL results in poor learning, cannot be adequately assessed, and is too costly—both in terms of time and effort—to deliver. However, they also often work with other educators who believe in PBL and already provide significant learning, and that their model of PBL is already perfect. 

There is some truth to the objections to PBL. Lazily done—and it is often done lazily—it can make students prisoners of their own experience. Usually, PBL, under its various avatars, such as Co-operative Education, results in better placement rates, simply because students are more familiar with workplaces and the network they help build. However, whether this advantage rolls over to career progression is a more difficult question to answer. The data on this is difficult to obtain because of the nature of the enquiry (which requires data collection over several years), but also because it is difficult to control for the effect of PBL (and disregard the impact of economic cycles, industry trends and random factors). Additionally, career progression opportunities in more visible roles are often limited to those who attend more prestigious universities, which tend to focus more on research than on PBL.

The objections about assessment also need careful consideration. The evaluations of PBL are naturally focused on practical outcomes, and only indirectly on how much one has learned. Enthusiasts for multiple-choice questions would always win the argument about 'objectivity', whether such a method has any real-life usefulness. The performance assessment techniques, routinely used at workplaces and continuously improved with technology, are often too 'Taylorist', and operate with a narrow frame of reference, not all of which may be suitable for education.  

Finally, the lecture model in Higher Education is the cheapest one could possibly invent, and whether it works (the correct answer is, it depends), it is the wrong benchmark for cost. However, at the outset, implementing PBL can be costly: not only because project teams are usually smaller and the 'per-seat' cost is higher, but also because there are costs involved in acquiring customers - real companies or use cases - and managing the interface between the student-members and them.  

PBL advocates who reject the above objections out of hand as excuses given by educators who do not want to change should consider these objections seriously. The reason why some people swear by PBL while others object to it isn't ideological: It is that they are prisoners of their own experiences! Of course, the universities closely integrated with industrial ecosystems and have a track record in this have invisible privileges: They attract students who want to do that kind of learning, coming from families that have had similar experiences over generations (I met some at a conference in University of Waterloo), and are backed by employers who have been working with them for years! Such advantages are challenging to build overnight and complicated to scale. Imagine trying to do this with first-generation students, without deep employer connections, and one can see why some educators may be sceptical about PBL. 

However, this is not an ideological issue, but a practical one that needs to be solved. We are living through a second machine age. What we consider knowledge, how it is produced and shared, and what we would do and how we should think, are all undergoing a rapid transformation. It seems like the peak of the industrial age - the end of the nineteenth century - with one crucial difference: We don't have our equivalent of coffeehouses, workers' institutes, Saturday lectures, or networks of informal, practical learning that are crucial at times of such significant change. YouTube and social media are poor alternatives, as they are more suitable for spreading misinformation (by lowering the attention requirement) and are more one-way streets. Vocational education, by being labelled as such and choked to death under bureaucratic management, privileges formal learning over tacit knowing. If I could, I would rather set up a coffee house than a college. Still, a coffee house doesn't operate in a vacuum (I saw RSA trying to set up a coffee house to facilitate friendships and conversations, only for the laptop-wielding start-up crowd to take it over). 

This is the background for me to consider scaling Project-based Learning to create opportunities for it to be implemented more widely. We are in the mass higher education era, and a solution that works for a handful of people at a significant cost in developed countries is no longer good enough. However, we must first battle the naysayers and explore the art of the possible for PBL in the most unlikely of places (e.g., a first-generation institution in a dying mining town in Australia), as well as the PBL purists who can't see how much they take for granted. The PBL we need is not the PBL we have: The model requires a twenty-first-century upgrade.