learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Making Constraints and Decisions Explicit to Support
Project-Based Collaborative Learning
Gert Faustmann
Department of Cooperative Studies, Berlin School of Economics and Law,
Germany
gert.faustmann@hwr-berlin.de
Abstract: Learning projects serve as motivational instruments to transfer knowledge and competences relating to
real world problems. Yet, the learning effect varies among participants. The anticipated results of a project and
their relation to real life questions are formed by complex requirements and, while the project advances, the
complexity of the results emerging increases. Furthermore, project groups often consist of participants with little
experience in the subject of the project. While the project progresses, the overview of requirements and results
already developed is lost. The learning effect can now be raised by making the requirements on the expected
project results as well as the decisions for existing results explicit. In this way, participants understand the
decisions of others engaged in the ongoing project and they are able to align the existing results with the
requirements imposed on them. Additionally, new ways of collaborative learning are possible when, for instance,
the task is to develop constraints on or between the respective project results. Former research developed a
concept to keep less experienced project members in the productive process while forcing other project members
to give arguments for their results. The current work describes an approach which aims to integrate the
requirements on results in the learning process. While arguments were to include digital documents or specific
parts of these documents for clarification purposes, the incorporation of explicit requirements is now also
manifested in digital documents. The requirements can then be related not only to single result documents, but
also to whole sets of expected documents. The paper gives an example of a software development project where
some design documents have to be developed. It shows how constraints on these documents are presented and
how these constraints affect the collaborative learning process.
Keywords: project-based learning, cscl, arguments, digital documents, learning process
1. Introduction
The integration of learning projects into teaching is a common instrument and improves the ability of
students to solve real world problems (Doppelt 2003). Yet, certain problems arise when practicing
project based learning:First, the participants’ knowledge of the project in relation to the project task
often differs. While this is a key reason for implementing a “collaborative” approach in learning, for
some learners the learning effect may stagnate, because the project advances and the results
become more complex making it more difficult for them to understand the new results and their
relationship. Without any explicit help the students will not be able to contribute to the project.
Second, in nearly all domains the expected results share complex requirements and dependencies,
which themselves can be seen as knowledge about the domain space. We can distinguish between
requirements that are related to just a single project result (e.g. the amount of pages for one specific
text document) and overall requirements, that are related to more than one result (e.g. use UML
diagrams for designing a software system). Especially the latter are difficult to learn because they
often contain implicit knowledge of a domain (as in the above example, which diagram types have to
be used and how they interact).
We take a generic approach in order to tackle both sides of the problem. While the participants work
in a learning project and contribute result documents, they are committed to add further documents
that explain these results. These documents can be arbitrary digital documents allowing to add
information of any form. So other project members better understand how the existing results were
developed. To manage the complexity of the project constraints, the teacher can choose to add
documents that influence the later development of the result documents. These constraint documents
support the learners in constructing the overall results. With the introduction of supporting documents
for expected and existing results of a project, it is possible to think of new learning processes that
integrate these documents in different learning phases.
The paper starts with an account of existing approaches that incorporate any kind of metadata into
learning processes for reasons of supporting the learners in understanding the project’s results. Then
an example for a learning project from the field of software programming is introduced. This will be the
basis for defining the different document types and the way they are used in this concept. Afterwards
some new approaches on how to organize the learning process will be presented. The paper ends
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