CBE Webinar ‘Students as stakeholders in CBL: their perspectives & learnings’

CBE Webinar ‘Students as stakeholders in CBL: their perspectives & learnings’

Tuesday 28 March 2023 / 9:30 – 11:00

Speakers:

Ulises Salinas-Hernández, Birgit Pepin and Zeger-jan Kock (TU/e): Understanding the affordances and constraints of CBE courses for applied mathematics and applied physics students

In Challenge-based Education (CBE) students combine the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge with the development of transversal competencies while working on authentic and sociotechnical problems. The aim of our research project is to support the mathematics and physics engineering disciplines by informing them about the affordances and constraints of CBE for their students. We do this by focusing on the students’ voices concerning their learning experiences in CBE disciplinary and multidisciplinary courses through case studies and qualitative data collection and analysis methods. Theoretically, we consider the role of resources (e.g., cognitive, social, material, digital) for the development of disciplinary knowledge as well as for mathematical (e.g., computational thinking) and professional (e.g., problem solving, collaborative work) competences.

In the presentation we will share some results found so far in four different courses on: how students perceive their learning, the type of feedback and guidance received from the different stakeholders. We will include a first outlook of the comparison across the different cases, in which we consider both similarities and specificities of each course.

Jovana Jezdimirovic Ranito (UT): The gains of involvement of external stakeholders in CBL project

What do students, teachers and domain experts learn from engaging in a Challenge-based learning (CBL) project? And to what extent do domain experts foster critical thinking in students? These questions were addressed in a research study that took place in the context of the 2021-2022 semester 2 project of the ATLAS program of the University College Twente, part of the technical University of Twente in the Netherlands. The project theme was “Sustainable Oceans” and the assignment for the students was to write a short-term and long-term socio-technical scenario for an emerging technology related to the theme. In this project, 28 first-year students, 5 ATLAS tutors, and 6 domain experts from industry, research, and society participated. The main research questions were: what do all stakeholders in this CBL project perceive as their main learning gains from participating in this project? And to what extent were the domain expert able to foster critical thinking activity in students? Data was collected using surveys, interviews, audio recordings of student-expert meetings and student focus groups. Preliminary results show clear learning gains for all stakeholders, even though challenging issues in the collaboration process were identified.

Saskia Postema (TUD): Beyond interdisciplinarity: Introducing multi-level perspectives in local authentic challenges through CBE 

Challenge Based Education has much to offer to students and teachers on the one hand, and experts and societal stakeholders on the other. Because the learning is built around a societal challenge, CBE projects provide ample opportunity for students to test domain-specific knowledge, and familiarise themselves with interdisciplinary approaches. Moreover, engaging with stakeholders from both industry and society further aids the development of students. Within the context of the City Deal Kennis Maken 2022, TU Delft focused on identifying co-creational approaches to CBE that include a wide variety of societal stakeholders, both public and private sector, as well as civil society. Building on the experiences of students in these projects, the question was raised how we could better include all learning levels? Authentic challenges are rooted in the sharing of knowledge, experiences and practices. Students should thus be equipped with the skills to exchange information with individuals from all walks of life. Therefore, the purpose of the new City Deal Kennis Maken Delft proposal is to expand the potential of CBE by moving beyond interdisciplinarity alone, and introduce multi-level perspectives into local authentic challenges. Currently in preparation, preliminary focus groups have led to interesting insights on the potential payoffs, and what conditions need to be met in order to facilitate reciprocal cross-boundary collaboration between multi-level students and stakeholders.

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