Scaffolding CBL, groupwork, and project management with Loop Board
SATLE Logo
A SATLE Funded Project
Project Title: Scaffolding CBL, groupwork, and project management with Loop Board
Team Member(s): Dr Rob Lowney and Dr Clare Gormley, with support of DCU Futures lecturers
Audience: Staff and students who engage in Challenge-based learning, groupwork, project work, reflective practice and other active learning approaches
Aims/Objectives: Loop Board is a collaborative tool for Loop that functions like a digital pinboard or "post-it" note wall. It allows teachers to create columns (categories) where students can add "notes" containing text, images, links, or videos. It can be organised visually, supports multimedia and text, links, and YouTube videos, images and files. DCU was an original funder of the tool in 2021. It is available to all institutions who utilise the open-source Moodle software (which powers Loop). This round of SATLE funding aimed to develop Board further to expand the technical capabilities of the tool by integrating a native templating functionality, so teachers can easily provide structured frameworks that guide students through the complexities of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL), groupwork, project work, and other approaches. Use of these templates would help create a transparent environment where teachers can easily monitor group progress and provide timely interventions if needed. Specific objectives included:
- Develop a "Big Idea" Template: Create a pre-structured layout that allows students to propose, vote on, and rank specific topics within a broader challenge.
- Integrate the "Engage, Investigate, Act" Framework: Implement a specific template based on the ECIU CBL stages to facilitate progress documentation and reflective practice.
- Deploy a Kanban Project Management Tool: Build a template specifically for action-item tracking, allowing groups to evidence their workflow and task completion.
- Streamline Teacher Setup: Reduce the administrative burden on teachers by allowing them to select and deploy pre-configured boards directly onto their Loop pages.
- Formatting Options: Enable additional text formatting options for Board posts.
This project addressed the challenges associated with Challenge-Based Learning (CBL), a signature pedagogy at DCU aligned with the DCU Futures philosophy. While CBL offers significant potential for authentic student engagement, students—particularly those in their first year—often struggle with the transition to self-directed learning. Consequently, the project focused on providing the necessary scaffolding to support student autonomy while enabling teachers to fulfill their roles as mentors by effectively monitoring group progress.
The project team collaborated with Brickfield Education Labs, the developers of Board, to extend the functionality of the Board tool within Loop. This enhancement introduced a suite of pre-built templates designed to scaffold the CBL process, as well as text formatting enhancements.
The project team collaborated on a spec for the enhancement, defining user stories as to what we would expect the teacher and student to be able to do with these new templates. Brickfield wrote the new code, integrated it into the existing codebase, and provided a testing environment for the team. The team thoroughly tested this new version of Board, and fed back to the developer around language strings, administrative config and more. Once incorporated, the final version was shared with DCU's Loop hosting provider, who then deployed it to Loop in time for the 2025/2026 academic year, ready for teachers and students to use.
The team promoted the availability of these new features to the DCU community via updates to the Faculty Teaching and Learning Committee and regular all-staff email update.
DCU staff can learn more about Loop Board in this resource on the Loop Staff Support Page (login required).
The impact of the project is ramping up, as more staff elect to use the latest version of Board to support CBL. One lecturer remarked "The piece about it in the TEU newsletter came along just as I was trying to finalise how to best ask students to document and submit their CBL processes.. so it met my needs perfectly. I really liked that it was set up using the DCU CBL phases- so that helped solidify the framework for the students (as it is my first CBL module!)"
The project has helped to re-iterate DCU's leadership position in digital learning by continuing to invest in an opensource tool which enables collaborative learning, a key active learning pedagogy central to student success and outcomes.
Because of this, the project also impacts other Moodle-using institutions who have the Board tool installed. So even though this was incepted at DCU to support CBL and other forms of collaborative learning, other institutions can avail of the pre-built project management, groupwork, and reflective practice templates.
The project re-iterated the need for clarity of purpose when approaching digital tools enhancement, ensuring the proposed enhancement is pedagogically informed and user-centred. The creation of user stories helped with this, and robust testing validated it.
In the immediate future, the team will continue to raise awareness and promote the use of Loop Board and the templates, and seek to develop other templates.
The team also intend to formally evaluate staff and student experiences of using the templates through a REC-approved study.
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