Organization of teaching the "Project activity" in the RUT (MIIT)

Bobrova Elena Viktorovna ORCID: 0000-0002-9215-0959 Senior lecturer, Department of international transport management and supply chain management, Institute of international transport communications, Russian university of transport (MIIT) 127994, Russia, Moscow, Obraztsova str., 9, p. 9 oumnique@gmail.com

Introduction

The inclusion of the discipline Project Activity (PD) in the educational programs of higher educational institutions has increasingly become a trend in recent years.  This trend has not been bypassed by humanitarian areas such as history. For example, project activity as a mandatory element of training has been included in the HSE educational standards for all bachelors since 2014, including for students of the educational program "History" (volume 4 cu) - https://www.hse.ru/ba/hist/project ?ysclid=lu55aheurf80277794 . In some universities, for example URFU, it is called "Fundamentals of project activity" (3 z.e. are allocated for its study) - https://programs.edu.urfu.ru/media/documents/00088678.pdf .

In different universities, the teaching of the discipline of PD is organized in different ways, but at the same time it is everywhere aimed at solving similar problems:

· stimulating students' motivation to learn through meaningful work on creating product results;

· formation of universal meta-subject competencies: teamwork skills, goal setting, self-organization, understanding, analysis, schematization, working with a problem field, etc.

· working out the application of professional and instrumental skills acquired by students in contexts as close as possible to future professional practice.

In general, we can give this definition: project activity is an educational technology aimed at developing thinking/reflection through the formation of the ability to identify and solve a problem. And in this context, it makes no difference which direction students study it. It is equally important for humanitarians-historians and for technical engineers. The skills that students acquire in the process of learning PD are universal.

Some universities simply add the discipline of PD to their curricula, but there are also a number of universities that have taken a course on project-oriented learning - the implementation of an educational model in which students master new competencies in the process of working on a project that responds to a challenge (a real problem or need of people or organizations) existing in the real world.

It is important to understand that a problem is a much more complex concept than a task (a concept that is usually used in the learning process). Project–based learning and task-based learning are completely different learning models. The tasks simulate typical situations, for which you need to perform certain algorithms of actions. The problem is an objective obstacle in the detail of some people or organizations. This is a situation for which there is no standard solution and you need to come up with your own comprehensive multitasking solution.

In the article, we will show how project-based training is implemented at the Russian University of Transport (RUT (MIIT)). There is no such field of study as "History", but, as practice shows, both the teaching methodology and the tools mastered by students can be successfully integrated into various humanitarian educational programs.

The RUT Project Activity Model (MIIT)

The PD discipline has been included in all full-time curricula at the RUT (MIIT) since 2021. Students study it for 7 semesters (for bachelor's degree) or 11 semesters (for specialty). At the same time, the volume of hours is very significant - 19 CU (684 hours) for bachelors and 33 CU (1188 hours) for specialists (includes practical classes and consultations).

The formation of a unified Model of RUT (MIIT) project activities took place gradually. If in the first year of its implementation, the university management guided teachers (mentors) leading this discipline to get some kind of product from students that can be "felt" with their hands (model, website, program, document, etc.); in the second year, priority was given to custom projects (which have a real customer) In the third year of study, the emphasis was placed on the methodological aspects of project activities.

The result of this work was the development of the document "RUT Project Activity Model (MIIT)" ^[1]. The peculiarity of the Model is that it is the same for all areas of study, both technical and humanitarian. Student projects are made by international experts, managers, lawyers, sociologists, regional scientists, etc., and not only engineers, builders and programmers.

As of February 2024, the following are involved in the implementation of project-oriented training at the RUT (MIIT):

· RUT Project Activity Center Higher Education Development Department (RUT CPDS (MIIT));

· 24 responsible for PD in institutes and academies;

· 315 project mentors (teachers leading this discipline);

· More than 160 industry partners (project customers);

· More than 10,500 students (1-3 full-time courses).

In total, over 3,400 projects have been implemented in these three years.

What is a project (in ROOT's ideology)? A project is a time- and resource-limited activity that leads to the achievement of a set goal. The goal should be to obtain a unique (non-serial) result. That is, every time a project is implemented, some step in development must take place.

The characteristics of the project are: the usefulness and value of the result (the project always solves someone's problem), the novelty of the result, the limited resource (primarily time), the team nature of the implementation, the need to involve experts, the career guidance component.

The objectives of the PD are: to obtain product (the problem is solved, the product is received, the solution is found), educational (the project participants have learned something, there has been an increase in "intellectual capital") and socio-cultural results (communication skills have been mastered, the value norms of the professional community have been assimilated, etc.); students have developed the ability to make independent decisions (there has been an increase students' subjectivity), as well as the skills to independently form their own educational request and trajectory of their own development. ^[2]

The most important result of project activity is the formation of students' reflection skills – the ability to comprehend the entire process of activity upon completion, analyze it and draw conclusions, that is, the ability to look at the course of their thoughts "from the outside".

By type of activity, student projects are divided into research, engineering, entrepreneurial and management. ^[1]

The result of the research project is the acquisition of new knowledge. The main activity in such a project is research work. The product result is publications in scientific publications, conference reports, patents, etc. In RUT (MIIT), this type of project is practically not used, but for the direction of preparation "History" it seems to be the most suitable.

What should be considered when working on a research project?

1. The target product result of a research project should not be related to the results of the student's main academic or educational activities. The results of the project can later be used in a course or thesis, but the text of the course work or the WRC itself cannot be the only product result of a research project.

2. In a research project, a project mentor plays a completely different role than the supervisor of a course or thesis. Students should determine the goals and objectives, object, subject and methods of research independently. A project mentor can only provide consulting support.

The result of the engineering project is technical systems that solve applied problems in various fields. The main activity in such a project is development work. The product result is design, technological or working documentation, software, models of various technical systems, prototypes of products, devices, etc.

The result of the entrepreneurial project is the creation of new startup organizations, the main source of profit of which is the sale of new goods or services developed during the project. The main activity in such a project is the creation of commercially demanded products based on new scientific or design developments. The product result is a startup launched.

The result of a management project is a measurable increase in the efficiency of an organization. The main activity in such a project is the optimization and development of processes in existing organizations. The product result is recommendations, methods, calculations for changes in the organization's activities; reports on the implementation of such changes.

According to the source of the project application, student projects are divided into customized and initiative projects. ^[1]

The priority is given to custom projects - focused on solving problems or meeting the needs of a specific customer organization. At the same time, the customer can be either external – these are organizations that are industry partners of the university, or internal (administrative divisions and student organizations of the university itself).

Initiative projects can be launched on the initiative of students, teachers, staff or some individual experts. But unlike custom projects, they are not focused on solving a specific problem of a specific organization, but on meeting the needs of a wide range of potential customers or users.

According to the level of projects, student projects are divided into diagnostic, educational, educational-applied and applied. They differ in the degree of increasing complexity and in the difference in the target result (see Table 1).

Table 1. Classification of student projects by project level

Methodology and tools

The most important from a methodological point of view is the diagnostic project implemented in the 1st semester of the 1st year. It begins the acquaintance of students with the discipline of PD. Students who have just enrolled in a university after school or college do not have a high level of development of professional and universal competencies necessary for the implementation of customized projects, and they have a very vague idea about the project activity itself. The practice of our work with 1st year students shows that despite the fact that some students were engaged in PD at school, these classes are methodically completely different from PD at the university.

The objectives of the diagnostic project are: mastering the basic concepts, tools and norms of PD; positional analysis and problematization of the situation; testing the hypothesis of a solution and updating it after verification and discussion with stakeholders (involved parties); generation of a solution and its discussion. An important element of training at this stage is to conduct team reflections after each beat. In fact, students should learn after 1 semester that any work on a project is reduced to completing four stages of work:

1. Revealing the truth of the problem.

2. Designing the solution.

3. Prototyping and testing (an attempt to implement a solution and verify its operability).

4. Reflection (an attempt to realize what was done, what was not done and why it happened).

To identify the true problem, student teams must collect the most complete information about the problem and the stakeholders involved in it; master conducting in-depth interviews with the customer and stakeholders; learn how to schematize the situation and analyze the information received. At the same time, it is advisable to use problematic situations that are close to the understanding of first-year students for training, and stakeholders are available for interviews.

What tools are students learning at this stage?

1. Tools for working with stakeholders - individuals or organizations who are affected or interested in a particular project, initiative or business. Each stakeholder has a unique point of view and a set of expectations that must be taken into account when making decisions or taking actions that affect them. Stakeholders may include not only those who are interested in a positive solution to the problem, but also those who are not interested in it. ^[3]

- Bulbous diagram - reflects the degree of involvement of various parties in the development of the project. The bulbous diagram consists of four circles. 1 circle – persons directly involved in a specific problem situation. Circle 2 – those who are concerned about this particular situation. Circle 3 – those who are concerned with this category of situations. The 4th circle is all the others minimally involved, but still playing some kind of role. ^[4]

It should be remembered that there are no standard solutions in PD, so the choice of the composition of stakeholders and their location on the onion diagram depends only on the student team itself and if several teams are dealing with the same problem situation, they will all have different bulbs. The task of the project mentor is only to point out to the teams the obvious logical errors present in the diagrams.

For example, here are the onion diagrams of two teams (see Figure 1) trying to find a solution to the following problem: "Students always have a large number of things at home, including those related to the educational process, which they do not need, but other students may need. The situation could be corrected by an exchange between students, but there are no mechanisms and conditions for such an exchange in RUTA." The team from the OMO-111 group (International Relations training area) identified 10 stakeholders. The team from the OMN-111 group (management training area) identified 5 stakeholders.

Figure 1. Bulbous diagrams of the "Passed-Gave" case of the teams of the OMO-111 and OMN-111 groups

- the diagram of interest/influence (see Fig. 2.). The distribution of stakeholders on the axes of interest/influence helps to determine the tactics of interaction with different groups of stakeholders of the project, including taking into account those who are not interested in the implementation of the project.

Figure 2. Diagram of the interest/influence of the "Passed-Gave" case of the team of the OMN-111 group

- stakeholder cards are necessary for a detailed description of each of the parties involved in the problematic situation. There are four criteria that are minimally significant for analysis: who is like that; what he wants; what we want from him; our value proposition for him. The list of criteria is determined individually for a specific project.

Table 2 shows an example of filling out the stakeholder cards by one of the students of the OMN-111 group team. In the process of working on the project, the students clarified the topic and solved the problem not for things in general, but for things necessary as props for events implemented within the framework of the youth policy of the RUT (MIIT).

Table 2. Stakeholder cards of the "Passed-Gave" case of the team of the OMN-111 group

2. Tools for working with hypotheses. In the process of working on a project, students must always generate hypotheses – assumptions or guesses that must be proved in order to move further in the project. There are problematic hypotheses aimed at finding out whether the situation in question is a problem or not. This is where you should start working on the project. Hypotheses arise further when it becomes necessary to find out whether everything is really arranged as students imagine.

- HADI cycles are an experimental scientific research method consisting of four stages: formulation of a hypothesis (H), action (A), data collection (D), conclusions (I). The hypothesis must be meaningful (in case of confirmation or refutation, give new knowledge); consistent (not contradict previously established facts or proven hypotheses) and simple (contain only one thesis).

In the process of hypothesis research, the results are recorded in a table that contains the following columns: hypothesis (formulation of the hypothesis itself), action (description of what should be done to test the hypothesis), metric (description of how the result of hypothesis testing is measured), expected effect (in quantitative terms, so that it could be subsequently change and evaluate), the test completion criterion (fixes the number of checks or time, usually no more than 1 week, after which it is necessary to stop collecting data and start analyzing them), the effect obtained (equal to the expected effect), conclusions (whether the hypothesis was confirmed or not, and if not, whether it should be rejected altogether or somehow adjust it for a new check). It should be remembered that not every hypothesis is confirmed, a negative result is also a result. Students should pay attention to the fact that there are so-called "stop hypotheses" containing banal statements that are not worth checking and wasting time on. Table 3 shows the problematic hypothesis of the "Passed-Gave" case of the OMO-112 team.

Table 3. The problematic hypothesis of the "Passed-Gave" case of the team of the OMO-112 group.

- problem interview is a way to test project hypotheses. Students select one or more stakeholders and conduct interviews with them. When conducting an interview, it is important to consider a number of limitations: 1) we do not ask questions about the future, only about the past or the present. 2) questions should be open (which cannot be answered: yes / no, I know / I don't know, I can / I can't, etc.), since the task is to bring the interlocutor to a detailed story; 3) you can not prompt, think for the interviewee, sell your idea; 4) you can not ask for opinions and assumptions, since the main task is to find out the facts, to understand how you work without us. It is very important to hear detailed stories during the interview process, get insights (insights), and identify facts. You should pay attention to the same answers, as they prove that everything is as stated by the interviewees.

3.                 Schematization of the activity situation helps to launch the students' thought process, discuss how to build a project, and how it can be implemented. With the help of schematization, it is possible to visually fix a problematic situation, display existing gaps in the activities of some stakeholders on it; schematize ideas of possible ways to eliminate identified gaps. ^[5]

4.                 The "5 why" method and the analysis of root causes (trees of current reality) are necessary in order to figure out why what is happening is happening, to find the true cause of the problem. Students formulate the main question starting with "Why?" (corresponding to the main gap identified in the process of schematization); write out hypothetical answers to this question; build causal relationships between these answers (cause at the bottom, effect at the top); and identifying the causes of the causes, grow the roots of the tree until they reach the root causes. The identified reasons need to be checked for truth, as well as for the correctness of the formulations. The wording should be clear and contain a statement. The connections of the tree need to be checked for alternatives; the absence of tautologies, substitution of the cause by the effect, etc. The root causes should be divided into zones: control (we can change something ourselves with our own hands); influence (we can influence the situation through conversations, appeals, etc.); adaptation (we cannot influence in any way). To implement the project, you need to choose one root cause, which lies either in the control zone or in the zone of influence, on which the project will be built.

5.                 Brainstorming is necessary to generate a design solution. It consists of two stages: idea generation (the absence of criticism is important) and convergence (analyzing ideas and choosing the one that best corresponds to the "like/we can" position).

6. The Blue Ocean strategy is necessary to formulate those properties of the solution that will make it more competitive than existing analogues. To do this, an analysis of analogues is performed, 10 properties of similar solutions are selected that users pay attention to and that are highlighted by other manufacturers, and a score from 0 to 10 is given to each of these characteristics. The characteristics that receive the maximum points are included in the description of the project idea formulated according to the template: This is a <service, mobile application, ...> that helps <who> to solve <describe the client's problem> using <describe your solution or technology> and gives <benefit (value) to the client>.

7.                     The architecture of the design solution is a large-block description in the form of a diagram that allows you to understand which key functional elements the solution consists of and how the proposed mechanism will function. When designing the architecture, it is necessary to identify the key elements of the solution and the connections between them, as well as the processes that they provide in order to perform the specified functions.

8.                     The intelligence map of the project is a method of structuring and visualizing concepts using a graphical record in the form of a diagram. The following elements are presented on it: the main goal of the project; the tasks that must be completed to achieve the goal; the resources that will be needed to implement each task of the project (people, finances, equipment, etc.); an action plan for each task of the project; expected results for each task of the project; success indicators for each task of the project (they should include a metric by which you can assess whether the expected result has been achieved or not).

In the remaining semesters, the work of student teams is carried out in accordance with the team track, which includes: the formation of teams around the project application (the pool of applications is formed by project mentors and expert customers during the previous semester and is published on the RUTA website); conducting a workshop on project concepts and solution architecture; expert evaluation; internal acceptance from customers; demo-institute day; demo day of the university.

In the process of working on projects, in order to ensure end-to-end accounting and analysis of the content of projects throughout the university, each team generates a project passport for each project, which has three stages: a project application, a project work passport, and a final project passport.

Already during the diagnostic project, students master various software tools: project management programs, charting applications and intelligence maps. IMTC students use YouGile (to coordinate collaboration, set tasks and deadlines for their completion), diagrams.net (for building various diagrams) and whimsical (for building intelligence maps using artificial intelligence technologies).

Problems and solutions

Conducting PD involves a number of difficulties for the teacher.

Firstly, his role is changing – he becomes a mentor, which means that he should not teach and give assignments, but only observe the work process of the student team, making adjustments as necessary. This, of course, is less relevant to the diagnostic project, in which there is an intensive process of teaching methods. But here another task arises, no less difficult – to be able to interest students, explain to them why they need this discipline, what it will give them.

Secondly, the team nature of the work causes a number of problems related to the fact that there are always students who do not want to work and are the "ballast" in the team, or for some reason (sometimes for good reasons) do not attend classes - how can they get an intermediate certification? The solutions here may be different. The author of the article uses the following practice – all the tasks that the team solves in the process of working on the project should be recorded on the online board. Responsible persons, deadlines, checklists are also displayed there, working materials or links to them are attached, there is a working correspondence and the fact of work is recorded. In addition to evaluating the performance of the team with a presentation on the defense of the project, when setting a credit, the degree of student participation in the work of the team is taken into account – he submits an individual report describing everything he has done, and the report data is checked by the teacher with the data recorded on the online board. There are often problems with students who are kicked out of the team in the middle of the semester, or with those who do not receive credit during the session. Such problems have to be solved individually.

Thirdly, there are difficulties with the formation of project applications – both for diagnostic and custom projects for 2-7 semesters. But in this and many other matters, the mentors are helped by the CPDS RUTH (MIIT).

Fourth, before becoming a mentor, a teacher needs to understand for himself what is required of him and master the PD tools. To do this, twice a year (at the end of August and January), advanced training in PD takes place at the RUT. Methodological recommendations for the implementation of the discipline (module) have also been developed "Project activity". ^[6]

Conclusion

In the process of preparing the article, in March 2023, an online survey of 1st year students of the IMTC was conducted. The purpose of the survey is to receive feedback from first–year students, which allows them to understand what exactly, in the opinion of students, became the most important and useful for them when they first got acquainted with PD at the university.

63 students from 5 groups of managers and international experts participated in the survey. As can be seen from Figure 3, students call the most useful tools those that allow them to figure out how everything really works and what is the root cause of the problem.

Figure 3. Answers of the 1st year students of the IMTC to the question Which PD tools do you consider the most useful?

In the answers to the second question, "What useful things did you get as a result of studying PD in the 1st semester (in addition to the tools)?" a third of the respondents noted communication skills (the ability to work in a team, lead a team). Other answers concerned the development of critical thinking skills, analysis, goal setting, reflection, stress tolerance, finding solutions, etc. Someone learned their strengths and weaknesses, and someone learned to "think more".

The answers convincingly demonstrate that the main tasks of PD, such as stimulating students' motivation to study and the formation of universal meta-subject competencies, can be solved in the learning process and within one semester, within the framework of those academic hours that are usually allocated for the PD discipline in the areas of training "History".