🧠 Project Template of the Month: Master's Course (Education)

Miša Hennin

Hey!

@fionaburke designed this project board to help students and professors with organization and time management. Professors can manage an entire course in a single project board - By inviting students to the board, everything is transparent and clear.

At the start of the academic year, all students on a course are invited to join the project board. Professors can use the board to maintain an overview of students on their course, to remind students of assignments and to share useful resources. Students can network with others, view the contact details of their professors, be notified of upcoming assignments, and benefit from a shared academic and professional knowledge base 👩‍🎓. 

Before classes start in September, a volunteer student is given the role of Board Master 💪. He/ she is responsible for maintaining the project board, ensuring due dates are up to date and adding events and notices. There is a bulletin board section for resources and information, an events section to share the details about upcoming events, and a module section which lists the modules and their assignments. Finally, assignments are moved across the Open, In Progress and Completed sections in line with the advised dates for each of these stages 📈.

Template Highlights

Using Custom Fields to Share Contact Details

When you add custom fields to your project, they will appear automatically in every task you make. In the example below, custom fields have been added for contact details and course information. This means that every new professor or student added to the board will immediately see empty fields ready to be filled with their details: custom fields encourage contributors to add supplementary information, enhancing the value of your project board.

Adding Tags to Clarify Roles and Make Information Easier to Find

Tags make your project boards more searchable via filtering and easier to understand quickly. In @fionaburke's board, students and professors are able to see at a glance who teaches which subject and which students have been allocated the Board Master and Event Manager roles thanks to brightly colored tags. As a result, it is easier to access the correct information immediately - for example, if Sally Johnson needed the details of the upcoming Debate Club meet-up, she could open Burt Spash's task directly, see his contact details and reach out to him to get the information. 

Using Due Dates to Improve Organization 

It is the Board Master's responsibility to create new tasks for upcoming assignments. These tasks can all be created at the beginning of the semester/ year or as the year progresses. A month before an assignment is due, the Board Master should move the relevant task to In Progress. The In Progress section has an Update due date automation so that when a task is added to this section, the due date will automatically be added for 30 days time. This will help students stay organized throughout the year and remind students when it is time to get started with an assignment. 

Many students struggle with personal time management - often, students wait until the last minute to start an assignment, but seeing a task in the In Progress section should encourage students to begin with plenty of time.

Linking to Other Projects for Module-Specific Information

As explained above, each module in the course has its own task in the Modules section of the board. The task describes the module and lists the assignments. In the task description, you can also see a link to another project board. Each module for the course has its own separate board for more information on assignments and a bigger collection of relevant resources. Access to module-specific boards could be limited to students taking those modules.

Adding Checklists and Relations in the Module Tasks

Finally, each module task in the Modules section has an assignments checklist and task relations. The checklist can be made at the start of the year so students know exactly what is due and when. This will help improve organization and reduce the risk of any nasty surprises. The Board Master can check off assignments as they pass.

We have seen above that tasks are made for each assignment. Task relationships can be added between module tasks and assignment tasks. Relations are displayed in task windows and can be clicked to open the related assignment. This adds further clarity and acts as a reminder of what is expected and must be completed. 

Want to explore further? Import the json file linked below to your own MeisterTask account 😍!

💡 More info on importing project templates can be found here. Note: Automations won't be imported and will have to be set up manually. You can find out more about automations here.💡

Masters Course Project Template.json

Joerg Koper

Hi @Miša and @fionaburke 👋🙂

What a nice project board! I like the simple layout and the simultaneous effectiveness. The special potential of such project boards becomes particularly apparent in the further course of the study programme. Namely, when valuable information can be accessed in retrospect.

I consider networking to be a very important resource during studies, which is made accessible here in a very easy way. For boards like this, I recommend the business version of MeisterTask with appropriate rights management.

Miša Hennin

Hi @Jörg Koper thanks for your comment!

I was super impressed when Fiona shared this one with me, I think it's such a brilliant idea and very functional.

You've also raised an interesting point about it becoming especially useful retrospectively. I never thought about it like that. I saw it more as a great resource as students pass through the year, but of course coming to the exams and the end of the year, it would be very valuable to look back at the info collected throughout!

I also agree with your comment on networking. This collection of details shared with all the students could help students reach out to each other and form connections!

Emily

Hey! THis is a super cool project board and is absolutely an idea I'm going to try and implement. I think it'd work both for university courses and smaller high school classes.

I especially like that all students will be able to see when they're expected to be working on an assignment. I guess professors (or the Board Master?) would move assignments to In Progress when it's expected that students be working on them. This is a nice nudge for students to get going with their work.

Thanks for sharing!