Rebuilding Higher Education Around Solving Real-World Problems - Dr. Kristin Wobbe, Director of the Center for Project-Based Learning at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

What happens when a university rethinks the whole higher ed model rebuilds it around hands-on, project-based learning?

Matt Kirchner dives into the bold model pioneered by Worcester Polytechnic Institute with Dr. Kristin Wobbe, Director of the Center for Project-Based Learning. A biochemist turned curriculum innovator, Kris has spent nearly two decades helping WPI embed real-world projects into every stage of a student’s education.

From first-year seminars on global challenges to immersive junior-year team projects with community partners around the world, WPI’s model turns students into creators, collaborators, and critical thinkers from day one.

Whether you're a university leader or an instructor in search of a better way to teach, this episode offers a masterclass in how to make learning stick.

Listen to learn:

• Why students don’t need to “know everything” before they dive into hands-on learning
• How WPI redesigned its calendar and credits to prioritize deep project work
• What first-year students can accomplish when they take on global problems
• How project-based learning transforms both faculty culture and student confidence
• Why WPI students are more prepared for the workforce than their peers

3 Big Takeaways from this Episode:

1. Project-based learning works best when it starts early and is embedded across the entire student journey.
At WPI, students can opt into the Great Problems Seminar in their first year—a two-course sequence that explores global issues like food security, energy, and AI through interdisciplinary teamwork. By senior year, every student must complete a Major Qualifying Project worth three full courses, often in partnership with faculty or industry, making project-based learning a requirement, not an add-on.

2. The humanities directly enhance technical learning and student outcomes.
WPI’s alumni data shows students who complete their humanities and arts curriculum earlier perform better in technical coursework later on. These experiences sharpen communication, interdisciplinary research, and critical thinking skills—essential for identifying problems worth solving and communicating solutions effectively in STEM fields.

3. Project-based learning is scalable far beyond polytechnic institutions.
Through WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning, Kris and her team have supported schools ranging from the Air Force Academy to community colleges and liberal arts institutions like the New England Conservatory of Music. With 85% of WPI faculty incorporating projects into their courses—and over half of student work now project-based—the model proves adaptable across disciplines, schedules, and resource levels.

Resources in this Episode:

To learn more about the Center for Project-Based Learning at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, visit: https://wp.wpi.edu/projectbasedlearning/

Other resources:

• Read Kris's book Project-Based Learning in the First YearBeyond All Expectations

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Transcript

Matt Kirchner: 0:00

Matt, welcome into this week's episode of The Tech Ed podcast. My name is Matt Kirkner. I am your host. How many times have we said here on The TechEd Podcast that I was a and continue to be a hands on kinesthetic learner. I was never a classroom learner. I was never very good at learning by reading, but when I could get my hands on something, when I could do something physically, that's when all of the learning came together. For me, project based learning was my way of learning. We're going to talk all about that today on this episode of The TechEd Podcast, how bringing students learning right into their haptic zone, showing them how they can engage with learning, makes that learning stick, makes it that much more effective. And we're having that conversation with our guest, Dr Kristen wolby. She goes by Chris. She's the director of the Center for project based learning at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Dr woby, thank you so much for being here. I'm delighted to be here with you So Chris, thank you so much for joining us. I want to talk to you about all the great things that are happening there at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. We'll get into to what your organization is all about, what your institution is all about. But I know you made a major shift in the way that you were delivering learning in the institution did all the way back in the 1970s and really taking that last step curriculum that so many of us experienced during our journey through education, and changing that into something that was considerably different. So tell us about what drove that specific decision, and maybe the problem you were trying to solve, or the institution anyway, was trying to solve now, some 40 or 50 years ago. Well,

Kris Wobbe: 1:45

it was then, as it is now, a time of declining enrollment. And so one of the concerns was how to make the education more relevant to our incoming students and make it more attractive to them. But the way that we went about it was one of our esteemed leaders decided to put young faculty in charge of re envisioning the curriculum. And I think that was really an important step, and the young faculty were less wedded to what was happening, and looked around and thought, not only do we need to make it more attractive to students, probably we need to reimagine it so it better serves them as they leave, and that we are providing them with more of the skills and abilities they're going to need post being in a classroom, and therefore they developed this curriculum that was really built around projects.

Matt Kirchner: 2:34

How interesting is it that in this day and age, when we're talking about declining enrollments in higher education for all kinds of reasons, right? And we've got demographic reasons that it's just the pure math of how many students were being born, you know, 1520, years ago, and are now considering what they do after high school and post secondary, and that's a factor we've got changing perceptions about higher education, where it fits, where it doesn't fit, all of these things that are facing higher education. And what you're saying to me is that if we look back into the 1970s when institutions were facing a similar challenge, and they recognized they needed to do things a little bit differently to continue to attract students and make the learning meaningful for them, here we are again, now, some 40 or 50 years later, facing the same kind of challenges. Isn't that interesting? Do you agree? I do. I do agree. So if we think about this whole model of project based learning, and think about it in a more broad sense, what are some of the misconceptions you would say that other institutions that are maybe sticking to a more traditional classroom, sage on the stage, lecture type of learning, what are those misconceptions that they would have about a polytechnic education? There are a lot

Kris Wobbe: 3:39

of barriers, I would say, to adopting project based learning. But if we want to focus on misconceptions, I think probably the most common one is that students need to know all the things before they can do a project. They got to cram all this information into their brains first before you let them loose, right? They don't see the project itself as the avenue to learning

Matt Kirchner: 4:01

interesting. You know, I had a mentor a long time ago, and that individual taught me just it was really more of a business lesson, but it was all about the idea that you don't need to know everything about something in order to dive in, as long as you have the confidence that you're going to figure it out along the way, and in so many ways, that is what learning is all about. So is that? What I'm hearing from you is that it's this process of I don't have all the answers when I jump into the hands on version of learning, Polytechnic version of learning, that I can figure it out along the way. Is that a good way of putting it sure and

Kris Wobbe: 4:30

that that's really much more effective, because it's one thing to be told you're going to need to know something, and it's another thing to be confronted with I need to find something out to be able to do the thing I want to do that absolutely, immediately more motivating to learn the thing isn't that

Matt Kirchner: 4:45

right, right? You're going on this exploration. You're not starting with all the answers and then just going through and checking the boxes. I love your way of thinking about this. I love the way that you get this whole model started so early in the process as well. Now I understand that you helped launch the first year project. Project based experience. This goes all the way back to 2007, so we're talking about 18 years ago. So talk about that. I'm not trying to date either one of us, but man, it's crazy just to think that here we are in 2025 you were doing this 18 years ago. What does that program look like, and how have you evolved it over the course of those 18 years?

Kris Wobbe: 5:16

It started with an idea that you know. So we developed this project based curriculum, but a lot of the major projects don't happen until the students are further advanced in their careers. And students were coming and saying, but I want to start a project now. So it was partly driven by the students, and partly by the recognition that if we wanted students to perform well in projects downstream in their education, it would help to have projects upstream. And so the great problem seminars were conceived, and these are a two course sequence specifically for first year students. And each course in the sequence is focused around one of the world's big problems. And of course, the world has many big problems, so it's not hard to find one, right? And we put together two faculty from different disciplines, usually a humanistic discipline and then a technical discipline, and they had 40 to 60 students. And in the first course in the sequence, the two faculty work with the students to help them understand, sort of the depth, breadth and complexity of the problem, and to look at it from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, their own of course, but other ones that are really important, and also to see that who you are and where you are really affects how you will perceive the problem or experience the problem, and maybe see a whole different side of it than somebody in your community with a different kind of identity, or somebody in a different community, in a different part of the world. And while they are doing this, the students are doing little projects in teams that help them develop that content knowledge, but also help them develop skills around finding information, communicating, orally, written and visually, working with partners to solve a problem. And at the end of that first course, they're then ready to dive into the second one, where with the same faculty, same students. The students divide themselves into small teams of about four, and each team picks a small piece of that big problem and localizes it. So we're going to solve maybe a hunger problem for this community, or this part of this community, and then they have to spend some time figuring out how big a problem that is. Why is it a problem? What are the consequences of the problem? Then, how would people solve this problem somewhere else? And what are two potential solutions that will work here? And then, what would it take to implement one of those solutions? You know, if you do a compare and contrast, you know, what are the benefits and drawbacks of the two? Pick one and develop how that could work. And at the end of this, the students present, they have a report, and then they have, we have a giant poster session. So all the students who are in one of these present at the same time, and we invite the entire campus and the student, parents and the community, and everybody comes. And it's delightful to see these students who were a week and a half before, really anxious that they weren't going to be able to do all of this now, very proudly, standing in front of their poster and saying, Look, we did a thing. We had an idea, and it's evolved a lot over the the 18 years. We developed a cadre of folks who were really dedicated to the program and did a lot of sharing. I mean, co teaching with someone involves a lot of sharing. But then we developed this really nice network and learned what works well and what doesn't, and shared that across the network. And eventually we decided we had enough expertise that we even wrote a book about it. Did

Matt Kirchner: 8:37

you really? All right, we'll be sure and link that book up in the show notes for any of our listeners that are interested in learning more about that. So many different directions we can go on that last discussion. I mean, first of all, it sounds like in the first semester, all the students are working on the same general problem, right? So we pick a problem for that first semester. Is that right? Or is it multiple? There

Kris Wobbe: 8:55

are multiple problems. And so the students can decide, are they more interested in studying the problem of energy or of sustainability or of shelter or of food or healthcare, and it's an optional project. Not all of our students complete this one, but they do have the option, and they get to pick what sounds most interesting. Got it

Matt Kirchner: 9:15

Hey, have the topics or the problems evolved over the course of that period of time? Do they change, or is it pretty much the same topics. Every year we've added

Kris Wobbe: 9:22

and subtracted some, I would say probably our most topical one is we had one this year for the first time on artificial intelligence. Wow, we weren't even thinking about back in 2007 for

Matt Kirchner: 9:32

sure. Yeah, who was talking about AI and now who isn't talking about AI? In this day and age? We certainly speak a lot about it here on The TechEd Podcast. You know, a couple other things that just occurred to me as you're going through that answer. One of them, we had a guest really early on in the podcast, Dr Sue esperman, who at the time was the president of the of Ivy Tech, which is the technical college system in the state of Indiana, and she three degrees in engineering, had a baccalaureate degree, a master's and a. PhD in Engineering, and talked about on the engineering side, some of the challenges that she saw in higher education were that you would put engineers in a course and have them work through all their calculus and all their physics and all their really rigorous math courses before you kind of figured out if they were good enough to get to the fun stuff. And she said, Wouldn't it be great if we started with the fun stuff, and it sounds like that's kind of the logic. Are you hearing that from your students? So they like diving right in, right in that first semester. Does that help with recruiting? It

Kris Wobbe: 10:29

does help a little bit with recruiting, and it helps even more, I think students identify things that they can see doing with their education. So if you're taking calculus and physics and basic chemistry. It's hard to see, what is that going to be good for, right? And so having these courses can help them see, oh, as a chemist or a biomedical engineer or an electrical engineer, I can actually work on water problems I hadn't thought about, but water is a big problem.

Matt Kirchner: 10:58

I love the way that gives them context for that continuing education. I also like the way that you're pulling faculty from various disciplines within the institution. This whole project based learning idea doesn't begin and end with that first year. I know as students get into their junior year this this whole theme continues walking through that experience, then their junior year, they do what you're calling an interactive qualifying project, usually focused on integrating, again, my understanding science, technology and society, which I think is an interesting word to kind of throw in there, tell us about that experience. And what's the objective of that junior year project? I'm going to start with

Kris Wobbe: 11:35

the objective, sure, because those faculty back in the 70s recognized it was a time when technological advances were happening quite rapidly, right? And there was some sense that the science was moving faster than our ability to wrap our heads around what the consequences were. And so one of the objectives of this project is to help students understand that there are consequences to the work they do, that whatever we're doing, it's going to affect people, and thinking about what might be the impacts downstream of whatever it is we're working on. And as we've continued this project, we've also recognized that it works the other way too, that what we decide are problems and what we decide to work on and how we decide to work on them are also influenced by the society we are in. And so there's this two way street and helping students recognize that early in their careers was seen as really important.

Matt Kirchner: 12:34

Absolutely, it's not just that one way learning. It's actually a two way experience, and it's not just what are we going to learn about, what are we going to participate but how does that work that we're doing then affect other things and our place in the world? And really, really important to get that context as well. So give us a little bit more of a feel of that whole interactive qualifying project and how that feels for the student. This

Kris Wobbe: 12:54

is probably the most distinctive thing about a WPI education. So this project is the equivalent of three classes. They always do it with a faculty advisor, sometimes one, sometimes more than one, working with them. They're working at some issue or problem, at the intersection of science, technology and society, and they conclude with a fairly substantial report, and sometimes other things. And they can do this in one of two ways. The way the smallest number of our students do it is by doing this on top of taking a couple other classes. And so it extends over some period of the year to the equivalent of three classes worth of work. But the way more of our students, almost like 80% of our students, do this, is they do it as an immersive, one term experience. And we have, over the 50 years, developed a suite of 50 project centers where we send students and faculty to a place, and those places are located all over the world, where they spend seven weeks working intensively with a project sponsor. And in these projects in particular, they're all brought by local organization. It can be a government it can be a non governmental organization, a non profit, a small business. They have a problem that they want somebody to solve, and our students come in. They learn about the problem, they provide solutions and to make sure that they can be most effective in seven weeks, it's pretty short period of time for sure where they go, they have a prep class where they're learning what their project is and doing some background research on it, so that they've already got a plan by the time they arrive and and so that's a really transformative experience for our students, and For many of them, the first time they're really working in a professional environment, in interdisciplinary teams on something that's not their major,

Matt Kirchner: 14:48

any specific projects that come to mind, as you think about it, that are we provide a particularly good example of what that experience is like for the students.

Kris Wobbe: 14:55

Well, I had the privilege of being able to advise a group of. Some 20 plus students who went to Melbourne, Australia, and we had several different project teams. One was working with a local museum who wanted to assess the value of their collection that was not on display. And so the students had to learn about, how do you evaluate that sort of thing? How do you value that? We had another group that was working with a community organization that wanted to develop a curriculum for late teens early 20s around climate adaptation for their organization. We had another that was working with a nonprofit that wanted help developing materials to get more corporate sponsorships. Yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 15:41

very cool examples. And help me understand how the credit side of it works. I assume they're earning college credits as they're doing that work. How does that fit into the overall course sequence?

Kris Wobbe: 15:50

Well, the beautiful thing is, they're required to do the project, so it doesn't have to count in any particular discipline. It's just you have to do this project in order to graduate. And it's three courses worth of credit, and they get grades for the work they do in these projects. And

Matt Kirchner: 16:08

just another question is totally out of curiosity, so they're going off to some other you know, this project for seven weeks. How does that fit into a typical semester? And how do you make that work with the rest of the course schedule?

Kris Wobbe: 16:19

Well, that's because we don't have typical semesters. We made it easy. So one of the other changes we made in the 70s to accommodate exactly this kind of thing is our semesters have been divided into two, and our students take three classes for seven weeks, and then we take a break, and then they come back and take three more classes for seven weeks. So it fits neatly into one of those slots. Got

Matt Kirchner: 16:43

it, so it's almost like four quarters, almost maybe like I had in high school. I don't want to compare it, but at the right so it has more of that feel to it, very, very interesting and a really, really creative way to do it. Now the project based learning doesn't end then with your junior year, because you're heading into your senior year, and now you've got your we talked about the interactive qualifying project. Now we have the major qualifying project. Tell us about that next step in terms of the project based learning,

Kris Wobbe: 17:06

that's another graduation requirement. All of our students have to complete this. It's another project that is the equivalent of three courses. So it's a quarter of the work the seniors do, and they all are engaged in doing something in their major so that's the major qualifying project part. So this is a capstone, but a pretty in depth Capstone, and the projects can be sourced from faculty so they get involved in faculty research projects or from corporations that want students to work on developing a new thingy. And they're all done also under the supervision of faculty member who evaluates the work that they're doing and gives them a grade in the end,

Matt Kirchner: 17:45

fascinating. And so I mean the project based learning sequence continues all the way through their entire higher education journey. Really, really valuable. What do you hear from students, in terms of, you know your graduates, or as they're going through these projects, are they finding these experiences or differentiators when they get to the workforce or when they're starting their career search, or their search for whatever comes after their undergrad. Yeah,

Kris Wobbe: 18:07

we really do. I mean, even the students who are completing our great problems seminar, that first year project, if they go on interviews for internships or for that summer job, we've had them come back and say they said they never take first year, you know, rising sophomores. But because I was able to talk about my project, I was able to get this valuable experience. And similarly, our students, when they are leaving WPI and going into the workforce, we have employers who are delighted to come back year after year after year and hire our students. And I sat next to some of them at, you know, the luncheons that we have for the recruiters, and had them say, We recruit from all over but WPI students really know how to get right to work from day one. And I think the projects are a big part of that. But honestly, I think seven week terms have something to do with that too. Absolutely,

Matt Kirchner: 19:00

that's a really interesting way of looking at it. You know, it harkens back to me of conversations I've had with people in industry who, you know, a lot of times, and we've got, you know, tons of four year engineering degreed people working in our businesses. We're certainly, you know, not disparaging that path at all, but a lot of folks have said, hey, you know, when they get here, they're brilliant, and we know they're going to add a ton of value for our business, but it's a year or two before they're really boots on the ground. Understand the business inside and out, comfortable in the field, on the shop floor, those kind of things. And it feels like through these experiences your students are having, they're being prepared perfectly for those types of challenges that they're gonna face once they get into the workplace. And I think that's really, really interesting. The other thing that I think is super interesting is something that you mentioned just a little while ago. Chris and I'm going to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole. Actually, two things you mentioned. One was artificial intelligence, and like we said, you can't go a day without having some conversation or reading something about AI. The other one was the importance of teaming a technical faculty member from the humanities side. If I got that right. Or at least I'm close. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about in part because of some of the reading I've done recently. In this age of AI, they talk about a few different steps. I'm going to get wonky on you, and then we'll come back to a little more straightforward question. So I don't want to scare the audience or my guest at the moment, but as we think about artificial intelligence, and we get into the age of what they call artificial and general intelligence. So AGI, the the idea that machine learning and artificial intelligence can do all the things that a human can do, or at least most of them, can reason like humans, and then get into super intelligence, where the AI is actually smarter, further ahead, quicker than human beings are. And what happens to our world when that happens, when we literally have artificial intelligence, when we literally have machine learning, when we have supercomputers that are literally smarter, quicker and better at reasoning than human beings. And the whole question becomes one of ethics, in my opinion, and how do we balance technology and then all these ethical questions that come along with what it means to be a human, what it means to be an ethical human, doing the right thing and so on. And so I think we're going to see a push over the course of the next five to 10 years, as more and more people start to realize that that we've got to have a focus on the humanities along with all of these technical skills. And I'm a big believer that if you're just going to go after a degree in the humanities with nothing else that rides along with that, you may find some challenges early on when you get to the workforce, maybe not, if you can marry the two of those, the technology side and the humanities side together, that's what really creates a well rounded four year degreed individual. I know that that's buried, and not just buried, but built right into your programming. So talk a little bit about the importance of both the technical and the human side of education?

Kris Wobbe: 21:42

Yeah, I mean, you're right. The technical is super important, mostly to help students get confidence that they can handle technical stuff. Right? We all know that technology changes really fast, so what we're teaching them right now might be outmoded and shortly after they graduate, so having the confidence that they can learn that stuff is very important, but the humanities and arts are also super important. I mean, our students are primarily traditional college age students, and that's an super important time for figuring out who you are, what the world is, what's your place in the world? What do you want your place in the world to be? What do you want your world to be? And the humanities and arts really go a long way to help with that. But even more, we've learned from doing some analysis of alumni surveys that humanities and arts are also helpful for helping the students learn the technical parts of

Unknown: 22:36

their work. Tell us about that. That's interesting. Yeah,

Kris Wobbe: 22:39

and we think some of these are indirect, that in the humanities and arts, they're obviously focusing a lot on communication, no matter which of those they're working in, they're finding information in a different set of disciplines, and being able to find information across disciplines becomes really important. For sure, they're learning how to think critically about the problem, and so they can think more critically about, what problem am I trying to solve? Is it the problem that's being put before me, or is there an underlying problem? And so all of those skills help them in their technical disciplines as well. And so we see folks who do their humanities and arts curriculum early do actually better in their technical work later on.

Matt Kirchner: 23:22

You know, we hear students a lot of times as they're learning, for example, complex math or integrals or derivatives and these kind of things. And they're like, why do I need to learn this? And there's some, some real important reasons why that's important. I can tell you as a student who's a product of a Jesuit higher education where we had went deep into the humanities, right, even in business school, nine credits in philosophy, nine credits in theology. And if you want to hear students saying, Why do we have to learn this boy, you'll hear a lot in those kind of courses. But then you come through that coursework and you realize that you have this ability to think and communicate about abstract concepts. And if you can communicate at that level, and think at that level, I think you're exactly right. You bring that back to technology, and not for just for the reasons of of ethics and for philosophical reasons, but the ability to communicate in ways that you weren't otherwise able to. And so I think that's why it's so important that we, we keep all of this as part of higher education, and credit to you and to WPI for doing exactly that credit to you as well, for now, having 85% as I understand it, of faculty incorporating projects into their courses. So literally, 85% of your faculty members are putting some type of project into the coursework. Over half of the student work is project based, and I love that. So talk a little bit more about what you're seeing, not just in terms of the student outcomes, but in how faculty and students are approaching their learning together?

Kris Wobbe: 24:44

Well, that's such a fun question, because I think there is such a difference when you do that projects really open the door to curiosity and creativity in ways that traditional classrooms don't always do that we. Also, because we do co teaching in our great problem seminar, and we do co advising with many of our big projects, both the interactive and the major qualifying project, we have a lot more collaboration between faculty, so that teaching becomes less of a solo enterprise and more of a shared journey, and we share resources with each other. And collaboration is fun, but I think it also helps us understand more about what's important to be learned. So there's content learning that absolutely is important. Don't want to discredit that, but there's also process learning and understanding how we also need to help our students learn how to work well together in teams. We also need to help them learn how to perspective take from some other perspective, so it just provides a broadening of what's important to be learned, and can also for me, and I'll speak for myself, a lot of the details that academics so love are really not so important for our students, right? We appreciate the intricacy and the beauty of our discipline and the nuance, but most of our students just need to know this thing because they're going to go do something with that. That's not study all the nuance and intricacy of our discipline, right for sure, and I think it helps all of us see that more clearly, so we tend to be able to focus more on the big picture things.

Matt Kirchner: 26:28

It's refreshing to hear you say that. And speaking of those faculty members, I mean 50 years on, obviously, the folks that are delivering the learning today. You may have some of them left over from 50 years ago, but by and large, probably not many. And so you, you know, you've had this turnover in faculty. Does the does this approach, this Polytechnic, hands on, project based learning approach to education, attract a certain type of faculty member? Yeah,

Kris Wobbe: 26:51

I think it does. You know, I know for myself, when I came to WP I was excited to come to someplace where they valued both the research and the teaching. And we, you know, some of our most amazing faculty have that same desire that they want to be able to make an impact on the student, not just on their field, and then knowing that you're going to do projects, and it's probably something different than what most of our faculty experienced in the past. Have to be kind of risk takers and really curious about what that's going to be. And I think that's really helpful

Matt Kirchner: 27:24

in risk takers. And I would think in some ways, being able to act on the fly. I mean, you think about the traditional kind of classroom sage on the stage version of learning, there weren't a lot of surprises necessarily, maybe a question that came out of left field, but not a lot of surprises for the faculty member. They've really got to be able to be able to think on their feet in this particular model as well,

Kris Wobbe: 27:45

don't they? Well, they do. And I think that is one of the barriers to more places adopting project based learning. Faculty very much, have built a persona of being an expert. And that's of course they have. Of course I did. I did right? And then when you feel like you're going into a classroom, you're going into that classroom. That classroom as an expert, and to go into that classroom and know that somebody is going to ask you a question that you don't know the answer to is kind of scary until you say, but I can't know all the answers to all the questions, and so we're going to go in and say, but I'm really good at finding out answers to questions, and I can help you find out the answer to your question. So let's find it together. Absolutely.

Matt Kirchner: 28:24

Learn how to learn together. I love that. Yeah. Dr, Chris will be the director of the Center for project based learning in Wooster at the Wooster Polytechnic Institute. WPI is our guest on The TechEd Podcast, and now you're directing. You're co directing, I should say, Chris, the Center for project based learning, tell us a little bit about what that center itself does and how you're helping other institutions take the first steps towards this type of learning. So

Kris Wobbe: 28:50

the center is a very small, outward facing unit of WPI whose mission is to help faculty at other higher ed institutions advance project based learning on their own campuses, and we recognized about 10 years ago that we had accumulated decades worth of expertise in how to do this well, and that we really believe in it and feel that students are better trained that way. And so it sort of felt like an obligation we had to help others. And so we do it in a couple of different ways. Well, multiple ways, the two major ways, I will work with other institutions to craft custom workshops for their faculty. And it might be just a department or a program or just a bunch of interested faculty who want to figure out how to do either more project based learning or better project based learning, or just start down that path. And so we do that. And then our flagship thing is we have an institute on project based learning that we run every summer where we invite both teams from institutions or individuals to come, and we host. A series of workshops and keynotes, all on various aspects of using project based learning, and provide all of the participants with a coach so that when they leave, they have an action plan for what they're going to do when they go back to their campus to further project based learning, where they where they are, in the way they want to with their students. And I think it's really important that everybody knows we understand everybody's situation is different. Students are different, resources are different, schedules are different. We have to be able to accommodate all of that.

Matt Kirchner: 30:33

So in the summer learning that happens, who's attracted to that is that faculty or is is it deans? Is it chancellors? I mean, who are the kind of folks that are coming to learn about how to implement project based learning all

Kris Wobbe: 30:45

of the above? Usually it's faculty. Often it's something that is supported by the institution, Center for Teaching and Learning, whatever they may call that. Or there's a dean or a provost that's all about we need to change our traditional classroom teaching to something that is seen as more valuable and has a group of faculty that are eager to participate in that too. And librarians. Sometimes we get librarians and they're amazing. Love librarians, yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 31:13

absolutely, some of the most inquisitive and fascinating and and well studied people on the planet. I can't argue with that for a moment. I totally agree with you. So as they're coming and they're learning about project based learning, I can just tell you, as someone who spends a lot of time around higher education and, quite frankly, a lot of time liking to see the traditional model upended a little bit, because I think there's a lot of things that we're doing well, but a lot of things that we can do better in higher education. One of the things I hear most frequently, from whether it's faculty, a program director or provost, for that matter, when we talk about making some changes to the typical learning that's happening at a typical institution is there's not enough room in the course. There's not a room in the syllabus. We, you know, we've got, we've got these standards we have to meet the HLC is coming next month. I mean, you know, all of these reasons why we can't innovate. What's the message to those folks who are saying, Look, our models are pretty well set. There isn't enough room in what we're doing now to make changes. How would you recommend they go about thinking about making those changes?

Kris Wobbe: 32:10

It is one of the questions I get most often. My class is full. We are so busy we can't possibly add anything to it. And then I have a couple of questions I ask as well. Okay, how much of what's in your course needs to be there. How long has it been since you took a step back and looked at what it is that you're teaching and said, I don't know. Am I teaching this? Because it's been taught this way for the past. Fill in the blank number of years, good years, sometimes, yeah. And is all of this still as relevant as it was? Is the emphasis still in the right place? So some of it is, maybe it's time to do a little house cleaning in our courses. And that's not true for all of them, but I certainly know in my biochemistry classes, that was one of the things I had to do. And I did it, and I I was so happy afterwards. Yeah, right. But then the other thing to consider is, how can a project help you accomplish all of the learning objectives you have? What could you replace in your course with a project so that you're not cutting anything out, you're just swapping delivering

Matt Kirchner: 33:14

it a different way? Yeah, I love that. I love that way of thinking. And it's probably an easier sell. Is probably the wrong word, but it's probably an easier sell to someone who's a little bit worried about that disruption. Is, look, your students are going to walk out of your class at the end of the semester or the end of the quarter, whatever we call it, with the same knowledge. We have the same learning outcomes. We're just delivering them in a little different way. And, oh, by the way, because every learner is going to learn a little bit different way, we may even have more learning taking place. In fact, I would argue that we will have more learning taking place because of the interactive nature of the learning itself. So I think it's a great message for anybody working in higher education who's trying to figure out, how do we disrupt the model a little bit without totally upending the apple cart in terms of what we're doing and what we're delivering and what we're teaching, but just doing it in a slightly different, or in some cases, a radically different way, but with the with the same, if not better, results. So I know one of the questions our audience is going to have, Chris, as they're hearing this is, you know, this is great for a polytechnic institution. You've got the name Polytechnic right in the name of the institution. Clearly, this is, you know, your reason for existing. If I'm a typical liberal arts institution, you know, more traditional model is, does this model work there, or is it really just for those institutions that have already decided hands on learning and polytechnic project based learning is right for us?

Kris Wobbe: 34:35

Well, we have worked with all kinds of institutions, and I'm pretty sure I can say all we've worked with the Air Force Academy, we've worked with the New England Conservatory of Music, we've worked with four year liberal arts institutions. We've worked with regional publics and flagship publics in a whole range of disciplines. It's easily adaptable, and we've worked with community. Colleges. So I can give you some examples of some of the things that our partners have done. So College of the Canyons, it's in Southern California, and they've got faculty who are heavily engaged in getting civic engagement. And one of the projects came out of a class on making movies, and they did digital stories of survivals of the Holocaust. The students drew sort of cartoons, and they put it to music over the voice of somebody talking about their experience. Another class did a children's book about birds. That was the class project, so it can work in all kinds of disciplines in all kinds of institutions. It just takes faculty and students willing to engage in it.

Matt Kirchner: 35:47

So we think, I mean, you think about hands on or Polytechnic learning. I think for a lot of folks, immediately, what would come to mind would be something like an engineering program or maybe a healthcare program, where you kind of immediately go to the hands on nature of the learning. And what we're hearing, and you're clearly demonstrating, is this project based learning model is going to work almost regardless of what the discipline is that we're learning in. There's an opportunity for us to integrate project based learning in a really interactive, meaningful way, not just for the students, but for the community as well. Again, as we think about the changing world of education, our place and education and education's place in society. Every one of our guests has some experience, some paradigm, some perception of education that would surprise a lot of people. And it doesn't matter whether there's somebody that's working in education right now, like you are somebody that went through their education experience and hung on to some surprising thing that they came up with that they just thought would be interesting to the rest of the world. Is there something about your education, journey, or education in general, a belief that you have that would surprise other people?

Unknown: 36:50

Well, maybe several, but okay, we got time go ahead.

Kris Wobbe: 36:56

The one that I'm thinking the most about now is I don't really believe that the way we structure our education around disciplines, right? You got an English class, you got a science class, you got a math class. I don't think that best serves our students or their learning and focusing things more around questions or problems or situations where you could learn the same stuff, but in service of something that you can really engage in, and where the students see the connections between I need to know this math to be able to answer the science question, and then I have to write it up with good English and some nice visuals so that everybody will know what I know, right? And so I would blow up departments and re rejigger things

Matt Kirchner: 37:47

I love that blow up departments and rejigger things I love. I love thinking about how we could totally reimagine higher education in that regard. And I think that was a terrific and perfect answer to that question. One last question, I would love for you to go back to that age of 15, that time when you are a sophomore in high school as an example. And if you could go back and give that young Chris just a little bit of advice, what would that advice be?

Kris Wobbe: 38:13

I mean, the first thing I thought was, well, what would 15 year old Chris be willing to hear? Yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 38:18

right, exactly. It doesn't matter what you think, if it's not received, right?

Kris Wobbe: 38:22

Yeah. And so in the end, I decided that, you know, I was a very driven, high achieving high school student. And I think I would say, you know, maybe it's okay to have more fun. Have more fun, absolutely.

Matt Kirchner: 38:39

And that's good advice for a 15 year old, or for a 55 year old, or for an 85 year old, and in general, is to have more fun. And I think that's absolutely perfect advice. We've certainly had a tremendous amount of fun today with our guest, Dr, Chris will be the director of the Center for project based learning at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Absolutely fascinating conversation. Chris, I love the way that you are blowing up the model in terms of higher education, and have been now the institution for over 50 years. Absolutely great things happening there. Can't thank you enough for taking some time for us here on The TechEd Podcast.

Kris Wobbe: 39:13

That was delightful to be with you, Matt, thank you so much. And a delightful episode

Matt Kirchner: 39:17

with our guest, Dr. Chris woolby, thanks so much to our audience for joining us this week, we had some interesting references and resources that we talked about over the course of the discussion. Today, we will make sure and put those in the show notes for our audience. As always and every week, we have the best show notes in the business and the best social media presence in all of technical education as well. You'll find The TechEd Podcast all over Facebook and Tiktok. You'll find us on LinkedIn. You will find us on Instagram, wherever you go for your social media, you will find The TechEd Podcast, and we hope to find you here again next week, when we will be with you with another great episode. Thanks so much for being with us. You. The.