Problem-based and project-based learning

Abstract

During the last 30 years, Higher Education (HE) has changed a lot. In the Northern part of Europe, until the 1960s, the traditional universities dominated with the ideal of an elitist university with freedom of academic research, which implied searching for the truth, and with an approach to education as presenting research. After the 1960s, with the students' rebellion, the university culture changed. At the traditional universities, students started to formulate demands, and became critical of the decline of the dominant research paradigm. At the managerial level, students had more influence on the boards, and they also applied pressure to develop new educational models such as the project- and problem-based learning (PBL) models that were implemented in Bremen University in Germany, Maastricht University in the Netherlands, Linkoping University in Sweden, and Aalborg and Roskilde University in Denmark. During the 1970s and 1980s, the predominant picture was still that of traditional universities, but the university system expanded because of increased enrolment numbers (Carter et al., 2003). Often in history, unexpected partnerships occur: one of these partnerships was between the students' movements and industry. Many of the students' criticisms and alternatives, such as peer learning and problem-based and project-based learning, went hand in hand with demands from industry. For example, Aalborg University in Denmark was established in 1974 as a PBL university, due to lobbying from industry as well as being a result of the students' movement. This partnership was founded due to the fact that the largest faculty at Aalborg University was the Faculty of Engineering. It has been well known that there is a need for the ability to manage projects and co-operate, particularly in the technological field. During the 1990s, new competencies such as lifelong learning appeared on the agenda. A few HE institutions changed towards student-centred learning (case studies, problem-based and project-based learning, co-operative learning, etc.) on both small and large scales, in order to meet the challenges, but certainly also with a wish to decrease students' drop-out rates and to improve the quality of learning. Furthermore, employability was an issue, meaning that higher education should be more oriented towards the labour market in co-operation with industry. The university of tomorrow represents a trend towards an entrepreneurial university (Clark, 1998) with a high degree of complexity concerning management, research and teaching. This development involves the risk that universities will be competing for students, funding and that there will be a tendency for trading knowledge (Bok, 2003). Barnett (1999) points out a scenario based on "supercomplexity," which has an impact on leadership, research and teaching, where collaboration with other groups of people outside of university is a feature. This type of university is based on a network society where people form networks across traditional knowledge boundaries, i.e., across disciplines and across universities and companies. Institutions will also need more institutional power in order to navigate in this supercomplex scenario. So, there is not only more autonomy and privatization of universities, but at the same time, increased competition between institutions to attract students and research funding. In more and more countries, the existence of external boards, with appointed leaders instead of elected leaders, has become a reality at all levels in the university system (Kogan et al., 2000; Sporn, 2003; Askling and Henkel, 2000). The impact of this on the development of a university culture and the quality of teaching and learning is still to be investigated. However, there is a clear trend in Denmark that appointed leaders are not only given a more powerful position from which they can work, but they are able to use this power in order to accomplish change in the system. The question is, in which direction will future teaching and learning of engineering and science go? © 2009 Springer US.