Multi-week projects...do students use the extra time well?

One of the design decisions I made early on was to try to reduce the number of things students had to turn in. I didn't want to have things due every week. Instead, I wanted to require just three significant projects (significant in terms of authenticity and relevance...projects that could have a life outside of the course), and give students adequate time to work on them. I wanted students to have 3-5 weeks to work on each project, and I worked hard to match the project requirements and scope to the number of weeks I assigned for each one. I wanted to make sure students had enough time to let their creativity percolate, and enough time to actually creatively accomplish what they wanted to. And, allowing for more time per project also recognizes that adult students have things that come up in their lives that require their immediate attention...and academics must be set aside temporarily. With multi-week projects, students can still get projects done even if they have to take some time away from the coursework. Or, if they are taking more than one course and have to juggle deadlines.

But, I'm not sure that all of the students used the available time well. I have a sense that there is still a fair amount of last-minute scrambling going on for some. Some people work better that way, which is fine. But, for those who don't, the work -- and the learning -- suffers. So, is there anything I can do differently next time to avoid this potential issue, sort of having smaller project deliverables throughout (and then I'm back to what I wanted to avoid in the first place...lots of due dates for students to track)?

The idea I have is to require that each student post one question about their project each week that I would then respond to. This would help us stay connected, and hopefully at least encourage students to think about their projects from the get-go. I could even be a bit more specific then "post a question" by guiding the type of questions they should be asking at different phases of the project. For example, at the beginning of the project, I could ask, "Who is the audience, and what are the learning objectives for this instructional message?" During the middle of the project I could ask, "What challenge are you facing at this point in the design of your instructional message?"

I am going to keep thinking about this issue, but am thinking now that this sort of guided prompting on my part could help students use the weeks available to them for each project in a more productive way.