Overview

The emerging communications technology, and its level of penetration into work, school and the home, has meant that the amount of discipline specific information has grown enormously. Likewise, access to this rapidly growing pool of information is becoming easier and cheaper.
Universities are now faced with the issue of just how much of this information to teach students. Do we increase the length of the Programs to enable us to teach more? We would need to keep increasing this period every year and most students and employers would find this unacceptable. So we need to re-think what it means to study at university and just what knowledge, skills and attributes we expect from our graduates.

How PBL works

Problem-Based Learning (PBL)is a learning methodology that encourages students to take responsibility for their own learning and to develop a broad set of generic skills and attributes, along with relevant content knowledge. Broadly, the PBL process follows the following format:

1. A PBL activity would involve students meeting as small groups to discuss a particular problem situation that has no easy or straight forward answer.
2. The problem situations they face will be messy, authentic and are likely to occur in real life.
3. The group would use their own knowledge and experience when discussing the problem and treat it as if they were personally asked to solve it.
4. From here the group would come up with a number of hypotheses that are likely to explain and solve the problem situation.
5. Once these hypotheses have been established the group then negotiates an area of exploration for each member and retires independently to carryout the research.
6. After sufficient time has elapsed to allow the research to be completed the group will meet again to discuss the problem in light of the information discovered by the group members.
7. Now the group will draw conclusions as to nature of the problem and the best fit solution, given the information known.
8. Finally, the group makes a professional presentation as to the solution and its consequences.

Learn more

Examine the following links to see how other educators describe Problem-Based Learning

California State University

Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy

National Teaching & Learning Forum

University of Adelaide's LEAP Project

McMaster University Department of Chemical Engineering

Monash University

Southern Illinois University School of Medicine

Schools of California Online Resources for Education

Maricopa Centre for Learning and Instruction

Hong Kong Centre for Problem Based Learning

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