E48: Project-Based Learning | Kris Wobbe | The Global School & Center for Project-Based Learning

Kris Wobbe: “ We know from our research that more projects are better. You can have one really great project-based experience in your career, and that’s better than none, no doubt. But two is better than one, and three is better than two.”

Jon Cain: What’s the best way for students to learn in a time when artificial intelligence is changing so much?

One possible answer is a teaching method that’s actually been around a long time:…

Project-based learning!

It’s where students learn along the way to doing something meaningful – like solving a problem.

Today on The WPI Podcast, you’ll learn about this immersive approach to experiential learning.

And you’ll learn how WPI offers students a project-based learning experience unlike any other.

Hi.  I’m Jon Cain, and this is your home for news and expertise from the classrooms and labs of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Our guest today has built projects into the student experience… and she helps professors and university leaders from around the world -- learn about and implement project-based learning on their campuses.

Kris Wobbe is interim dean of the Global School at WPI and director of WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning. Kris, thanks for being on the WPI podcast. 

Wobbe: Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here with you, John. 

Cain: Well, first off, I was hoping, uh, you could start by telling us how do you describe project-based learning for folks that aren’t familiar with it?

Wobbe: Project-based learning is really an approach where you have students learn, um, new material while they are working to solve a problem or explore a new space intellectually. So, it’s very applied learning, um, and therefore a very powerful way of learning. One of the ways I think about it is it’s learning on the way to something meaningful. A lot of times in our courses, though faculty try very hard to explain why understanding or knowing the material in the course is important, uh, it, it’s not very sticky. But if students are using that material in the service of solving a problem or providing something to a client or bettering their campus it feels a lot more meaningful and is a lot stickier.

Cain: Why do you think that project-based learning is such a powerful educational approach? Why does it provide students something that they might not get through a traditional lecture-based style of teaching and learning, for example? 

Wobbe: Well, really good, high-quality project-based learning connects the learning to something that’s real, that the students can recognize as being important or significant in the world around them. So that connection is, is really important. If you are learning about algebra and don’t think you’re ever gonna use it, you can learn how to do it for the test and then forget all about it. But if you’re learning how to do algebra because it’s really important for this other thing you want to do with the answer you get, it now has a connection, and that connection makes that information stickier. It contextualizes and gives a reason for why you’re learning what you’re learning. 

Cain: Kris, I imagine that there’s a long history in education of teaching methods evolving to adapt to the times and how the world is changing. Right now, it’s obvious that there’s so much focus and uncertainty around artificial intelligence. I’m wondering, how does project-based learning fit into that evolving picture of education and work with AI at the center of gravity? 

Wobbe: I actually really love this question because it gives me the opportunity to say project-based learning is very old. John Dewey was publishing about it in 19 0-something, and so as a method, it’s very old. What changes is, are the tools that you use while you’re doing project-based learning, and certainly, the advent of computers has allowed us to do things in projects that we weren’t able to do without them, or it took much more time and was much harder, and I think AI fits into that bucket.It becomes a tool that we can use, but I think the advent of AI has a secondary, or maybe even that’s the primary thing. A lot of what the methods that have been used that are not project-based learning aren’t working so well anymore because students can substitute an AI-generated something for their own thinking and that’s problematic because if you’re not doing the thinking, you’re not doing the learning., and so project-based learning does, uh, several things. It sets students up usually in contexts that make asking AI to do your work for you very difficult. It engages students’ interest so they’re less likely to want to ask somebody to do the thinking for them. And then once they’re engaged and working on the project, it gives them tools to do things that they couldn’t have done before or do them much faster. And it’s up to the faculty to let them know at what points those tools can be used and at what points they want the students to do that work for themselves.

Cain: And I’m wondering what your thoughts are on the elements of project-based learning that really help students build skills for teamwork. And I’m just thinking to myself, there’s gotta be certain aspects of work and lives that AI can’t replace.

Wobbe: We’ve done a lot of assessment of the impacts of project-based learning on students here at WPI, and one of the things that stands out among them is having accomplished a challenging project gives students a lot of self-efficacy, a, a sense of agency, a sense of confidence. When we first instituted this project-based course in the first year, we had an external evaluator come, and one of the things that was uncovered was students felt like they could take on positions of leadership that they maybe had been afraid to take before. And so I think that self-confidence is hugely important. If you don’t think you can do a thing, you’re less likely to try. Uh, another thing that it does is a-absolutely helping students learn how to work in teams. Uh, at WPI, we, we put students in teams quite frequently, and in the beginning of that, we teach them how to work effectively in teams because that’s another skill that can be built and that’s super important. Project-based learning also asks students to take perspectives of other people, to consider other stakeholders, to consider their teammates’ op-opinions, to recognize that my set of priorities may not line up with somebody else’s set of priorities, and then how do you work with that? And I think those are all the human skills that are becoming so important in an age of AI when so much can be asked of AI, but some things cannot. We did a survey of our alumni, and one of the things that came up, uh, at the top of the list that the project-based learning did for our, our alumni was to give them power over their own learning, to recognize that they could teach themselves things. And I think again, in this world, this 21st century, mid-century thing where everything’s changing so fast, to have the confidence that you can go in and learn a new thing because you have to for your job is also super important. 

Cain: That’s a really good point. Um, I’m wondering, what was your journey to project-based learning? How did you first get exposed to this concept and how did it end up becoming something that’s a main focus of your career?

Wobbe: It’s an interesting journey. I, I didn’t really know anything about project-based learning until I arrived on WPI’s campus, and my first exposure was having to advise the senior year project, the MQP, with students. And I really enjoyed that, I’m a biochemist, and having students working in a lab with you doing research is not such an unusual thing. 

Cain:  Sure.

Wobbe:  So my exposure to doing it in the classroom arose from a class I was teaching where I wanted to make sure that students were aware that there was research literature And these were, it was a junior level course. This was a long time ago before, you know, research literature was available on computers- when you actually had to go to a library. And I kept trying to think of an assignment that would get students to the library to do something meaningful that then I was willing to grade when they turned it in. And, uh, it’s a very long story, but it turned into a summer’s worth of work that involved me developing a whole project that paralleled all of the course content for the entire course and I really liked how that turned out, and so I was sort of sold on building it into classes at that point. And from there, it was a, a step to volunteering to teach in our first-year program, the Great Problems Seminars. It’s very project-based. And I loved that so much, I was willing to become the director when that position became available. And then I was recruited to become the Center for Project-Based Learning director out of that position. So it’s sort of a steady progression from that first, how do I come up with an assignment that’s meaningful? 

Cain: Uh, you mentioned the MQP. That’s the major qualifying project. That’s a senior level design and research project, uh, the student does in their, uh, major area of study that’s required for completion here at WPI. so we’ve kinda hinted around this in the, in the early part of our conversation here, but, we should let people know clearly that project-based learning is something that, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has in its DNA, and it has for a long time. Uh, Kris, how did WPI end up going all in on project-based learning?

Wobbe: Well, back in the late ‘60s, WPI was a struggling institution, and there was a recognition on the part of leadership that we needed to do something different, that our very traditional approach to teaching engineers perhaps wasn’t suiting our students well for success as they graduated at a time when there was a lot of social unrest, when science, uh, was exploding, right? We were on the way to the moon. And, you know, we were involved in a war, and understanding the ethical implications of the science and engineering that was happening seemed really important. So, uh, leadership asked faculty to come up with a new way, and the way they decided was project-based learning. And so WPI, in a move, maybe unprecedented in the US, they threw out their curriculum and started by requiring three major projects, and then built the rest of the curriculum around those projects. So, that curriculum was introduced in the early ‘70s, and since then, I think faculty have recognized the power of those projects through the three required projects to graduate and have figured out how to build it into courses. So at this point, every student who graduates from WPI has three major required projects under their belt and a whole bunch that come from their courses. 85% of our faculty say they have incorporated projects into one or more of their courses. So, it’s kind of everywhere here. 

Cain: Yeah. It’s as prevalent as oxygen. Kris, you touched on this a little bit earlier, and one of the ways that we know that project-based learning can be so impactful, uh, specifically for WPI’s approach is that the university surveyed our alumni. Uh, and the survey that you mentioned asked about student experiences with project-based learning and how they reflect on it today, uh, in some cases many years later. So there was more than 2,200 students that responded across several decades of WPI graduating classes. I’m wondering what else, uh, stood out to you from the results of that survey?

Wobbe: One is that, uh, we all have had bad project experiences or bad  experiences working with a team, and that is one of the fears many of our students have when they come here is, “I’ve had really bad experiences. I don’t know if I wanna work in a team.” 

Cain: Yeah. “Why do I wanna sign up for that?” 

Wobbe: Um, and what the data were able to show is that even if you have a bad experience on a project, the learning that you gained from that project is still real, and it is additive to the experiences you will have in your subsequent project-based learning. So even the bad ones turn out to be valuable, even if they weren’t terribly pleasant. Another thing that we learned that I think might be a surprise, it certainly was to me, our students all have to do a project as the capstone for their humanities and arts requirement. And what we discovered is that that capstone actually facilitates the learning that students do in their STEM-based courses. So, it’s kind of fun and validating for our faculty in humanities and arts to see that that work that they do is actually very helpful for our science and engineer and business students. 

Cain: Um, there was a couple other things in the, in the survey that, that jumped out at me , 95% of students reported that their project experience at WPI prepared them for their current career. 88% of them indicated that their project work helped them develop a stronger personal character. So there’s a professional aspect to it. Um, there’s a personal. And just one other, uh, one, 93% of the alumni that were surveyed and, and responded said the project experience at WPI enhanced their ability to identify, analyze, and solve problems creatively through sustained and critical investigation. When I’m hearing these things, I’m thinking these are all important skills for life, and it sounds like a lifelong impact if it’s preparing them for the current career, ‘cause who knows how many careers we’re gonna go through. So I think those were some other ones that jumped off the page at me, too. 

Wobbe: Yeah. And another one that I really... we found counterintuitive, the projects help students develop a good work-life balance. 

Cain: So it’s not just about getting the task done, right? 

Wobbe: No. 

Cain: ‘Cause I mean, in life you gotta get the task done, but you gotta figure out how to make everything, everything work. So that’s, that’s fantastic to hear. You can see the survey results that we’re talking about on our website, wpi.edu, and we’ll have a link in the show notes to those results as well. And Kris you know, we all love data at a STEM school. I’m wondering, however, if you can share maybe some of the more personal anecdotes or reflections that you hear around campus. What do current students or maybe recent graduates, uh, tell you about what learning by doing and all these projects mean to them? 

Wobbe:  I’m gonna lean on a few things I heard this summer. We did a couple of events where we asked students to appear in panels and answer questions. And one of the questions was what they like about project-based learning. And one of the top responses is it made the learning feel more meaningful, that I enjoyed doing that because it connected that learning. For the projects, the big degree requirement projects that are more like a job, the students really appreciate those because it feels like a safe space to sort of try their wings and maybe not do such a great job, but learn from that so that when they are out in their first job, that they feel like they’re better prepared. And so that sense of career readiness and confidence, I think is a big thing. I can tell you a story. It’s not terribly recent, but it speaks to the power of project-based learning. We had, uh, uh, students in this first-year project-based course who were given a project topic from a nonprofit that actually operates in Kenya. And this particular project, well, there were two: one to help a small businesswoman with a soap business figure out how to do a better job, and another one to identify ways that if there was a small water purification system, how the water that it generated could be equitably distributed to the people in the village. The students were so entranced by these projects they spent the next year raising enough money so that they could go to Kenya and see what was happening on the ground with that project. That’s the kind of power some of these projects have. And students will start some projects in their first year and sort of let them simmer and work on them either in their own time or figure out how to incorporate those into subsequent projects that they’re doing because it becomes kind of a passion project for them.

Cain: Yeah, I could see where a lot of students could really buy into the work that they’re doing and, and it could take on a life of its own. On a, on the flip side of the coin, I’m wondering what students share with you about what’s challenging about project-based learning and, and how they work through it. 

Wobbe: Well, you’re absolutely right. There are challenges, and the students on those same panels are very forthcoming about those. And the number one challenge, maybe not surprisingly, is teamwork. And the students will talk about how frustrating it can be to be on a team where not everybody has the same expectations for quality of work or timeliness of work. But they will also then talk about how having that experience of having to navigate them, they see as being really valuable. And WPI has some real supports to help students with those teamwork challenges in addition to the actual h-helping them understand what good teamwork is and how to navigate it, we also have a center here that is designed to, work with students who are struggling in a team, figure out what the problem is and how to mitigate it so they can continue to work productively together. And that’s pretty unusual here, but a really valuable asset when we’ve got so many students in so many project teams. Another challenge students face in project work is sometimes they feel like there’s not enough clarity about how to do what they’re doing or when to do or what to do. And some of that lack of clarity is intentional because you want the students to be able to find their path. Too much ambiguity, we all know we’re not comfortable with too much ambiguity. So, providing the right level of support and the right level of freedom is a navigation problem for the faculty and the students. 

Cain:You mentioned the center that supports teamwork at WPI.

That’s the SWEET Center. We recently spoke with Anne Ogilvie who leads the SWEET Center. And we spoke with Lydia Ellen Tonani-Penha. She’s a fellow that works at the SWEET Center supporting students through teamwork challenges. Their interviews are part of a two-part series on teamwork on The WPI Podcast. You can hear them at wpi-dot-edu slash listen. It’ll give you some great ideas for how to navigate some of those common challenges that come with working in a team. Now, Kris, we’ve talked a lot about the benefits of project-based learning for students. But, there are some other critical players in this - namely the professors, the faculty, the advisors, and also in a lot of cases here at WPI, we have external partners that are sponsoring a project. And they are eagerly awaiting the students and what they can do. How do you think these other players benefit from project-based learning?

Wobbe: Well, I’ll start with the faculty. Projects are more fun because they take you into new spaces, right? A good open-ended project, you don’t really know where it’s gonna go, which is a challenge for faculty because we like to feel in control. We were hired to be experts, and when we feel we’re not standing on our expertise, that’s uncomfortable. But it allows you to be a learner along with your students. And most faculty got to be faculty because they like learning, and so there’s that joy of, of learning new things. There’s also the joy of, of working with students who are motivated. Um, you get to interact with students on a more, uh, one-to-one basis or one to four instead of one to 20 or 50 or 200 and that social connection can be really valuable. And then if you work with other faculty, that’s super enjoyable as well. We do a lot of co-advising and co-teaching here. Teaching is most often other places a solitary endeavor, but it’s always better to feel like you’re part of a team. 

Cain: And that can be across disciplines too, right? 

Wobbe: Yes, it can. Uh, a lot of our projects are co-advised by people in different disciplines, and that actually provides benefits both to the faculty and the students. So, the faculty get to see whatever the issue is at hand from different perspectives that can be broadening and enlightening of their own way of looking at that particular problem. They also can be then demonstrating to students about being learners and how people learn and seeing an expert learn a new thing. Um, one of the things I have thought for a while is many students seem to think faculty are somehow just intellectually different. That we came with a few extra cassettes in our heads that they just don’t have. And to see a faculty member learning at the same time they’re learning, and sometimes they get there ahead of us because we are in our discipline’s ruts that they don’t necessarily have. And then it’s like, “Oh, maybe I’m just as smart and can do what they’re doing or whatever they wanna do.” So, I think that that co-teaching can be a really valuable experience to show students about learning. 

Cain: That honestly sounds like a lot of fun for everyone involved. Do you have any thoughts on the benefits for the external partners that we work with on projects? 

Wobbe: Absolutely. And I think there’s another stakeholder too, which is the institution itself. But the external sponsors, we are pretty careful when we ask people to provide us with problems that we say, “We, we... Please don’t give us a problem you need solved, you know, in the next four weeks or one that’s mission critical to your staying in existence.” 

Cain: Mm. 

Wobbe: “Give us your back-burner problems, and we will put some smart students to work at it.” And , almost uniformly I guess, I don’t know any exceptions, but there must be some, people come back and they’re very happy. The students have worked really hard because they know somebody cares about what they’re doing. They usually provide something that’s quite usable, and people come back again and again and say, “Okay, I’ll take another team. Here’s another project. Help me further down the road.” So they’re getting not only, you know, usually three to four students’ good thinking, they’re also getting a faculty advisor’s good thinking, so it’s a real benefit to them. For the institution, the beautiful thing about projects is projects generate stories. And as somebody in marketing and communication- 

Cain: We love these stories. 

Wobbe: I’m sure you are very aware of the power of stories, and those stories are beneficial to the institution in keeping alumni engaged and proud of their institution, in proving to the city that we are in it with them. We are contributing to the development of the city and the betterment of the city or various community organizations, or the environment. And then they’re great stories for prospective students and parents. They wanna know what the average salary is of a graduate, but it’s also really cool to hear that while you’re here, you may get to go to some really cool place and help solve a problem or stay here on campus and help solve a problem so that when you leave, you’ve already left your mark on the institution.

Cain: , I’m wondering if we could broaden the picture out just a little bit. Project-based learning is a form of experiential learning, and some other examples in that space might be internships or co-ops, um, or undergraduate research. So if somebody’s listening to this and, and they’re considering college and they’re thinking, “Yeah, experiential, uh, learning sounds like the way to go-” How do you recommend that person finds the right school for them that can deliver the experiential learning opportunities that will make a difference for them?

Wobbe: There are a lot of different words for this. Experiential learning, there are co-ops, there are internships, there’s project-based learning, there’s problem-based learning, there’s work-based learning. So, I think getting familiar with the terms and understanding what maybe those differences are would be important. And then when you’re looking at institutions, you know, you can try all of those terms. See what shows up on that school’s website. If you are interested and you follow up with that, it’s important, I think, to ask questions like, “Who gets these experiences? Does everybody get these experiences? When do they happen? How often will I have that kind of experience?” You know, you don’t need very many co-ops for it to be a really beneficial experience. We know from our research that more projects are better. You can have one really great project-based experience in your career, and that’s better than none, no doubt. But two is better than one, and three is better than two. There is a saturation point, but it’s like 50% of your academics being projects is about where saturation occurs. So- 

Cain: There’s plenty of room to grow there. 

Wobbe: Yeah, I don’t think very many institutions get to that level, but it is something to look for because we see a lot of schools advertising this really amazing project that their students had the opportunity to do, and they took 30 students to do some really incredible thing for two weeks. Well, how did you get to be one of those 30 students? And what happened to the others? What kind of opportunities did they have? So, thinking about how, who has access, I think, is the most important question. 

Cain: So scale, Kris, definitely sounds like one factor to consider. I think we can pretty proudly state that at WPI, you’re gonna get a pretty full buffet of, of, uh, project-based learning.

Wobbe: Absolutely. 

Cain: Kris, in your career, you’ve worked with a lot of students on projects, you know, advising them, building projects into your curriculum. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, one of your current roles now and how you engage with faculty and college leaders from around the country, um, as part of your role as director of WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning.

Wobbe: Sure. And if you’ll forgive me, I’m gonna do a little history here. So we’ve done the alumni survey twice, and after the first time we did it, uh, we had all of this evidence about how powerful project-based learning was, and at that point, we had almost 50 years of experience delivering project-based learning. And there was this recognition that we had all this expertise, and we knew how valuable it was, that maybe we could share our expertise with other people who are interested in, uh, adopting or advancing their own project-based learning. And so the Center for Project-Based Learning was born. We had a lot of great support from the American Association of Colleges and Universities that runs a lot of faculty development, and they, they sort of affiliated with us and that was super important for us getting the word out. But, uh, for more than 10 years now, we have been giving every year an institute on project-based learning, where we invite teams of faculty from other institutions to come here, and we have curated both faculty and materials that we provide to these faculty to help them figure out what they wanna do with project-based learning on their campus and how it will work best for them and their students and their circumstances. We also will do roadshows, either virtually or in person. Um, and so other institutions contact us and say, “Can you give us a virtual workshop? Um, we’re just starting, so we really need the basics,” or, “We’re in it, and we’re having problems with teamwork. Can you help us figure out how to do teams better?” And we can, and we do. We are also developing a lot of resources that are available on our center webpage that, uh, anybody can access, about how to do project-based learning well. Because actually, we haven’t said this yet, but it’s important to understand that project-based learning, like any pedagogy, is pretty useless if done poorly. It has to be done well to get all of the benefits and impacts that we’ve already been talking about. So we’re trying to help people understand how to do it well.

Cain: And we’ll have a link to the Center for Project-Based Learning website in our show notes. You know, I’m wondering about some of what you hear from those faculty members and college leaders from around the country sort of big picture, what do you hear from them about what they’re thinking about the present and future of project-based learning in higher education?

Wobbe: It’s been really interesting. I would say especially over the past six years, there’s a growing recognition of the absolute need to transition to more experiential learning; that our students are asking for it, employers are asking for students to have actually used the knowledge that they’re developing in their careers, uh, parents are looking for it. So folks are really recognizing that giving students those opportunities while they are in college is really valuable.

Cain: For professors and administrators that are thinking about incorporating project-based learning into their curriculum, what’s the hardest part of doing that, and do you have any advice for them on how to overcome that challenge?

Wobbe: Yeah. So, switching from a lecture-based approach to a project-based approach is work. It is hard work, and it’s gonna take some time. So for administrators who are asking their faculty to do that, I think they need to understand that this is not something that you can turn on a dime, and that they need to provide some time, and whether that’s summer support or release time or, you know, at least some space, uh, you know, a little faculty development workshop maybe, where folks are given the time out of their regular routine to figure out how they’re going to make this work is really important. Faculty are sometimes anxious because trying a new thing, it doesn’t always work great the first time. And so having some understanding that, you know, if you are paying a lot of attention to student satisfaction surveys at the end of a course, maybe they’ll go down a little bit because students are being asked to do a new thing. Students always, aren’t always comfortable with that either, and sometimes there’s a little pushback. You know, “You’re supposed to be teaching me. Why am I doing all the work?” We’ve heard that more than once from students. So, understanding that that might be an initial consequence is important, and then aligning your incentives and rewards for faculty with th- this ask is important because if you’re gonna ask faculty to spend some time rethinking how they’re delivering their curriculum and only rewarding them for the amount of time they’re spending on their research, that there’s a disconnect. So thinking about how you’re setting your faculty up for success is important. 

Cain: Do you encourage faculty when they’re in the early stages of building a project-based curriculum to incorporate students into that process?

Wobbe: That is an excellent question, Jon. Absolutely. One of the things that I routinely tell faculty who are just starting out is that it’s not gonna be perfect the first time, so don’t have that expectation, and it’s really hard to judge how far a project can get to if you’ve never done one before. 

Cain: Yeah. Good point.

Wobbe: And so letting your students know, first of all, why you are embarking on this, because they are more than likely gonna say, “I don’t know why you’re doing this. Why should I engage in this?” If you tell them why and help them understand that not only are they going to learn the content of your course better, but they are gonna be developing these professional skills of collaboration and problem-solving and handling ambiguity, all things that will be useful for them in their careers, they’re less likely to be resistant. And then say, “We’re going on this adventure together, and we’re not sure where it’s gonna come out, and I need to get feedback from you.” And then ask for it regularly, and be willing to adjust based on the feedback you get. And not have too high of an expectation of what you’re gonna get out the back end. There’s a real temptation in project-based learning for the focus to be on attaining the final product. And of course, there should be a final product in mind, but sometimes you don’t get there because the instrument broke, or the thing you thought you’d have access to, you don’t. There can be so many reasons but that doesn’t mean learning didn’t happen. So, you can use the final product to assess the learning that the students did on the way, but if you don’t have a final product, there’s still lots of ways to assess learning, and you just have to kind of pivot and figure out how are you going to assess the learning without that product. Because, in fact, that’s what our courses are for. Not to make things, but to teach things. 

Cain: How do you help students understand that as well? When you are advising a project, do you advise them to do some self-reflection on what they’ve learned from the project so that it’s not feeling like, “Boy, this product didn’t come out the way we had dreamed and envisioned” because I imagine that probably happens a lot?

Wobbe: Yes. We try to and you’re right. Students are often more disappointed if they don’t get to the final product. And often in project-based learning, students will not recognize the learning that they’re doing, particularly of the professional skills. So having the professional skills built in as learning objectives and then asking your students to say, “Okay, you know, here’s one of our learning objectives. You were gonna learn how to be more comfortable giving presentations. Are you?

Cain: Check. 

Wobbe: Yeah. Yeah. And then they’re like, “Oh, yeah.” And, “Do you feel like you are better equipped to solve problems?” “Oh, yeah, yeah.” Right? So, um, that reflective piece can be really valuable for the students to recognize the gains that they’ve made. We’ve really trained students to think of learning as a set of theorems memorized, a set of flashcards that you know what’s on both sides, a set of A’s, and helping them understand that those are s- can be signs of learning, but they’re, they’re not the only ones, and getting them to recognize the other kinds of learning that will, frankly, most of that will serve them far better in their careers than the words they’ve got on their flashcards.

Cain: Kris, I’m wondering if there’s any- anything else that, uh, you wanted to point out or any closing thoughts that you wanted to give, uh, on this topic. We’ve covered a lot of ground, and it’s been a great conversation. But I’ll give you the final word. 

Wobbe: I have enjoyed project-based learning far more than I ever enjoyed the other kinds of teaching that I have done. Um, and I strongly encourage people to, uh, explore it as an option in their learning journey or, if you’re an educator, to think about incorporating it.

Cain: Kris, thanks so much for being on The WPI Podcast and sharing your thoughts on project-based learning and, and how it’s used at WPI and how it can be impactful, uh, wherever it’s used.

Wobbe: Well, thank you, Jon. As you can tell, project-based learning is one of my favorite topics to expound upon, and I appreciate having the opportunity to do that with you today. 

Cain: Kris Wobbe is interim dean of the Global School at WPI and director of WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning. Before I wrap things up, I wanna invite you to subscribe to the Advance PBL newsletter from the Center for Project-Based Learning. We’ll have a link to subscribe in the show notes. Also, check out wpi.edu for all things project-based learning. You’ll find descriptions of the different projects that are required for graduation at WPI, as well as a page that outlines the lifelong impact of project-based learning. I hope you’ll follow the WPI Podcast wherever you get your podcasts to check out all our episodes and hear the new ones when they drop. You can also find the show at wpi.edu/listen and on the WPI YouTube channel. I’d like to thank PhD candidate Varun Bhat for the audio engineering help on the episode. This show was recorded at the Global Lab in the Innovation Studio on campus. I hope you’ll join us next time for another edition of the WPI Podcast. I’m Jon Cain. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.