The UNESCO Chair for Problem Based Learning (UCPBL) was established 2007 at Aalborg University (AAU). The overall objective of this UNESCO Chair is to create a global society for researchers and academic staff working with PBL. This includes research and development activities, educational programs, consultancy activities, and the establishment of a global network for international cooperation and exchange of experiences.
The specific objectives are:
- To establish a sustainable global network of individuals and institutions already having or wanting to develop expertise in PBL.
- To establish a research network of active researchers in PBL.
- To develop and run a distance Masters Programme in Problem Based Learning in Engineering and Science (MPBL) open for participants at a global level.
- To disseminate experience gained from current projects concerning implementation of PBL in developing countries.
- To provide possibility for training and consultancy.
Next step in the visions
As globalization develops, technological innovation becomes a far more distributed and complex process oriented towards both regional and global markets, which call for technological and scientific competences to handle new complex, interdisciplinary and intercultural issues. The political pressure to provide sustainable scientific and technological transformations is ever more distinct in line with the increasing focus on health and climate change caused by environmental impacts of mechanization, industrialization and mass consumption. Engineers and scientist thereby face new challenge in order to provide scientific results and technological innovations that to a higher extend balance the economic, environmental and social concerns and follow the trajectory of globalization.
For the coming period, the UNESCO Chair has the vision to include sustainability and health in the overall vision. The UNESCO Chair is providing research evidence for the efficiency of PBL in Engineering Education. This focus will continue, however, there is a need for a broader scope. One of the core arguments for implementation of PBL is based on the need for innovative global competencies and today innovation goes hand in hand with sustainability.
But innovative development in regional areas also goes hand in hand with health issues and especially development of health to encompass contextual issues. There is a special tradition for PBL in medicine – and the UNESCO chair wants to combine the learning from the research in medicine, engineering and science.
An added objective for the UNESCO Chair is therefore to address the question how engineering educations address these requirements for global competencies and sustainability together with new educational models?
Education is regarded as having key responsibility for promoting sustainability, as stated in the UN. Agenda 21: Earth Summit - the United Nations Program of Action from Rio in 1993, “Education is critical for promoting sustainable development and improving the capacity of the people to address environment and development issues .. to be effective, environment and development education should deal with the dynamics of both the physical/biological and socio-economic environment and human (which may include spiritual) development, should be integrated in all disciplines, and should employ formal and non-formal methods and effective means of communication.”
Confronting sustainable challenges in terms of climate change, water and energy consumption, environmental pollution, etc., engineering education is facing the question of whether the future engineers has sufficient capacity to assess and address their sustainable development concerns. How can the university prepare candidates for the society with sufficient readiness to participate in solving the complex and often also ill-defined problems of professional life? How to help engineering students learn integrate environmental, social, and economical concerns into professional practice? Therefore, in order to help raise awareness levels in society, and assist in incorporation of the concepts into professional practice, it is important to integrate the concept of sustainability into the teaching of all engineering programs. Traditionally, what happens in formal engineering educational setting is that students are expected to passively absorb and reproduce knowledge transferred and provided by classroom teaching.
Sufficient studies have documented that the more complex the problem is, the more difficult it is for the learners to solve the problem with passive learning approaches, and therefore traditional teaching and learning methods cannot fulfil the task of providing the concern and required capability for sustainability. A few studies have evidenced that PBL can be an innovative pedagogy for education about sustainability. Therefore, it is getting increasingly recognized that there are interwoven relationships between PBL, innovation, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and sustainability.
The UNESCO chair cannot do this on its own. There will be established strategic alliances with research groups within this area and together with these research groups establish a common centre for PBL and Sustainability in Engineering, Science and Health Education. UNESCO will be applied for approval of this centre as a category II center. This centre will be established as a parallel activity to the UNESCO Chair.
Actions for 2009 – 2011
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Due to future revised objectives, resources and manpower, there will be established a new structure of the UNESCO Chair and a new organisation of the global network.
The new structure of the UNESCO Chair that will be implemented during the first half of 2009 will remain of a working board administrating a project structure for research, education and consultancy activities.
The management board will be a working board. It will consist of the chair, a number of appointed vice chairs and secretary. Chair and Vice Chairs will run the organisation and coordinate the projects and appoint specific project leaders.
The structure with the two advisory boards will continue. Both boards have the function to:
1) advise at the strategically level,
2) advise at the activity level by dialogue of work plans and annual reports,
3) contribute to the dissemination of knowledge about the chair activities and
4) contribute to the PBL global network activities.
This dialogue with international colleagues as well as with internal colleagues will be of crucial importance in the development of the PBL global network.
Figure 1: UNESCO Chair Organisation 2009-2011
The UNESCO chair will together with staff in research groups on environmental management and sustainability establish a common centre for PBL and Sustainability in Engineering, Science and Health Education. This centre will establish shared activities with the UNESCO Chair.
In the future, there will be more international staff related to the UNESCO Chair so that activities can be run in all continents of the world.
Actions for 2009 – 2011
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The UNESCO Chair will change direction in the further development of a PBL global network. From the beginning ideas concerning regional hubs and local memberships were announced. These ideas might involve an unnecessary hierarchy costing a lot of resources and with a risk of slow progress as the educational system and involved research resources on higher education vary a lot from country to country. Therefore, at this stage of global development, it is difficult to implement a uniformed structure. Maybe this will be possible in ten years time.
Instead, we will announce a project based approach to the PBL global network, which is basically based on open access to conferences and open resources on the one hand, and on the other hand projects and specific agreements concerning research, education and training. This will give a dynamic network and open up for collaboration at different levels such as individual level, group level and institutional level.
Figure 2: Organisation of PBL Global Network: the stars illustrate PBL activities – the arrows illustrate specific agreements among institutions.
The PBL global network will consist of the following activities:
- Conferences, open sources and virtual networks. These are open to all interested academic staff.
- Research activities that will be project based and with specific institutional agreements.
- Master education with formally enrolled participants or involved participants based on institutional agreements.
- Specific appointments concerning consultancy visits, workshops or larger and longer capacity building courses.
The organisation can be seen in figure 2. The idea is to establish network with self established junctions. These junctions will be based on local needs, agreements and funding possibilities.
All individual academic staff and researchers are welcome to join this network by participating in the activities.
Institutions – that are in a process of implementing PBL - are strongly encouraged to join this network as an entity and to share experiences of practice and research. The yearly conferences will facilitate forum for those institutions to share their stories of change towards PBL with interested people worldwide.
Every year, the UNESCO chair will facilitate yearly research and network conference and workshops moving from continent to continent. The various activities will contribute to development of open sources. These yearly gatherings are important to facilitate meetings among staff involved in change processes combined with research.
New initiatives for 2009 – 2011
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Research is the main activity for the UNESCO Chair in order to study the efficiency of PBL in engineering, science and medicine all over the world.
During the past decades, sufficient research attention has been paid to document whether or not Problem Based and Project Based Learning (PBL) can be used as a successful pedagogical method in higher engineering education. A rich body of literature has documented the effectiveness of PBL on students’ learning in different aspects, such as motivation, lifelong learning skills, deep learning, self-directed learning, professional skills, critical thinking, creativity, and process skills such as project management, communication and collaboration.
In the coming years, more evidence is needed to document the impact of PBL on the knowledge and skills students are attaining, as well as other potential effects. What evidence do we have, for instance, confirming that PBL truly results in deep learning, more complex knowledge and the ability to collaborate across discipline and cultural barriers?
In addition, research focus will not only be put on the efficiency of PBL, but also on the aspects that are related to the values of PBL, change process, cultural issues, sustainable development and not at least the research agenda is the methodology of research on PBL. The following are a list of focuses (but will not be limited to) that are worth attention in the upcoming research agenda:
- Research methodology applied in studies of PBL
- Effectiveness of learning methods in relation to specific groups (i.e. gender, cultural)
- Collaborative learning and innovation as well as the complexity in knowledge creation when crossing the border of discipline and culture
- Transferability of the knowledge and skills learned in a PBL environment to a work place
- Factors, drivers, barriers/challenges, potentials/possibilities of implementation of PBL, (in particular, facing the diversity of disciplinary, organizational and social-cultural issues.
- Engineering practice (i.e. assessment of interdisciplinary projects)
- Values of PBL in relation to the sustainability of Higher Education
- PBL and education ABOUT sustainability (PBL as an efficient pedagogy for teaching sustainability)
- PBL and education FOR sustainability (with an assumption that change of values and thinking for sustainability can take plan in an institutional culture where PBL is practiced)
- PBL and Education AS sustainability (epistemic reflection on learning as change and creation of new knowledge as outcome of cooperation – at institutional level)
Research projects
Establishment of new research projects are ongoing activities including writing applications. For research projects, we seek collaboration in the parts of the world where there are substantial funding of research, research already going on and possibility for joint research networks and funding.
As part of the research strategy is also the involvement in Engineering Education Research and participating the creating both the European and the global society.
PhD research projects
Training young researchers for PBL studies would be another key focus of UNESCO chair in the coming years. Different types of these training activities will be provided, and there is a need for developing new paradigms for education PhD candidates. This need address both organisational and scientific issues concerning:
- Full time PhD studies
- Joint PhD programs
- Visiting PhD students
New initiatives for 2009 – 2011
PhD
Academic visits
Publication strategy 2009 -2010
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During 2008, new study regulation for the Master in Problem Based Learning (MPBL) was further developed.
The new MPBL contains three modules: teaching portfolio, design of MPBL and the master thesis. Module two on design of PBL is offered as a single subject course to institutions that are in the process of changing to PBL and need upgrading academic staff. This seems to become a success – and the development of the MPBL will continue in this direction.
The homepage has got new layout and been restructured: http://www.mpbl.aau.dk
Module two offered as single subject course started with a new group October, 15. There are ten participants from Victoria University. Anette Kolmos ran a start up workshop, Victoria University, November 27-28. During spring of 2009, two more workshop/ status seminar will be held via conference room or Adobe Connect. Team based project report are expected to be submitted and evaluated before this module finishes on June 15th.
From Feb 15th, 2009, another single subject course (module 2) will start with a group of 13 people from Germany, France, Finland, Spain and New Zealand.
New initiatives 2009 – 2011
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The UNESCO chair is offering four types of consultancy and capacity building activities for changing to PBL at institutional level: visits at Aalborg University, consultancy visits, workshops and capacity building courses.
- Visitors are very welcome to visit the UNESCO Chair and Aalborg University. We organize two types of programmes:
- Announced one day visitor workshop which participants can sign up for.
- Special programmes for visitors depending on requirements.
- Consultancy visits are short visits – primarily in the beginning of a change period where we have meetings with management level, staff giving advice on how to develop a specific strategy for this institution.
- Workshops are shorter training events for aimed at both staff and management level. We offer workshops for:
- Curriculum development
- Institutional and organisational development
- Capacity building is a longer process over about two years aiming at an institutional change for the entire institution, faculty or study programme. Capacity building course encompass consultancy, workshops, distance teaching modules from the Master in Problem Based Learning, seminars and facilitation of curriculum change. Capacity building course will require a substantial funding.
For all four types of consultancy there is a fee policy.
New initiatives 2009 – 2011
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