Project-based learning fosters autonomy enables students to develop cross-disciplinary skills in group project management and reflexivity and teaches them to manage frustration when faced with uncertainty about the progress of a project. The main objective is to acquire multiple, transferable skills. This approach empowers students and helps them to develop as future professionals.
The tutor's role is one of cognitive companionship: he/she is neither the holder of knowledge, nor the manager of learning. He/she helps students to reflect on strategies for progress. This student-teacher relationship fosters student autonomy.
The socio-constructivist learning approach proposed here encourages students to share their knowledge, pool their skills and work in conditions very similar to those they will encounter in their professional lives (project management and job-specific specifications). This is what makes the apprenticeship authentic.
The aim of the project, to contribute to public information by implementing the Orphanet database, gives it an extra-academic value that gives meaning to the students and encourages their involvement.
The teachers emphasize that this teaching can easily be transferred to sectors other than biomedical sciences: project-based learning can be implemented whatever the context and final output, as long as the field is broad enough (e.g. creation of psycho-pedagogical fact sheets, creation of blog pages, implementation of data bases in social sciences, etc.).
The teachers note that to adapt this teaching to other sectors, the following points should be respected: i) students must be trained to receive and construct constructive feedback, ii) the project must have an extra-academic scope (eg. publication) to give meaning to learning and empower students, iii) for a literature writing and synthesis project, students need to have a grounding in critical reading, text comprehension, identification of key elements and ability to synthesize, iv) the involvement of tutors at mid-project and end-of-project workshops is fundamental to synthesize self-assessments and feedback, identify unclear points and reframe feedback if necessary; tutoring guarantees an adjusted and constructive process.
