Students' Project-based Learning Blogs (2010-2011)

     I teach two Advertising and Marketing classes on Wednesday mornings, a News English class on Thursday mornings, and two Travel and Tourism English classes on Thursday evenings.  Each class is divided into several teams of students.  Each team is responsible for creating a "web site" (actually a blog) to represent actual businesses.  
     The Advertising and Marketing classes simulate the creation of new products or services; that is, products or services that are not already on the market.  They design their advertising and marketing program from inception to market, creating a "web site" (actually, a blog) for their mid-term and final exam projects.
     Likewise, the News English class create on-line newspapers, and the Travel and Tourism English class creates virtual travel agencies.  The travel agencies specialize in vacation packages to less crowded destinations such as Guam and Swaziland.
     Educationists call it "project-based learning."  I call it "learning by doing."
     Educationists have other fancy ways of describing what we do in class.  To educationists, the learning strategy is "student centered," and it involves "cooperative learning."  To me, it's simply a commonsense approach that puts each student on a voyage to discovery, and the recognition that students learn more and better if they help one another rather than competing with one another for grades.
     There's another fancy term for it: learning in meaningful context.  That's just another way of saying that students learn better if they can see the point of what they're studying.  By designing their course to closely resemble real-world situations that they're likely to face after college, their assignments are more relevant to their needs.
     We're also told that project-based learning, learning in meaningful context, and so on, are "modern" or "innovative" approaches.  Actually, they're not; they're quite traditional.  Until a century or so ago, that's how most education took place.  It was called apprenticeship. 
     The now-discredited "memorize and regurgitate" method of teaching and learning are the more recent approaches.   Increasingly, those theories are being abandoned in favor of more traditional teaching methods such as learning by doing.
     Here are the classes and their "web sites":

Advertising and Marketing (early A.M.)
Advertising and Marketing (late A.M.)
News English
Travel and Tourism English (early P.M.)
Travel and Tourism English (late P.M.)