Description project
Rapid technological, societal, and digital advancements in society require higher education institutions to prepare students for the fast-changing contexts they will encounter throughout their lives. To optimally prepare students for their future careers/jobs, the current teaching and learning methods in higher education need to propel and train students’ ability to flexibly acquire new knowledge and skills in order to cope with and provide solutions for new, complex and uncertain situations and problems. However, current higher educational programmes often lack the elements which stimulate the development of these skills. Research has already shown that if we want to prepare students for future challenges, we need teaching practices which offer real-life complex issues, that are interdisciplinary in nature, and involve multiple stakeholders (Carbonell & van Merrienboer, 2019). These approaches are found in challenge-based learning (CBL) and they have a great potential to stimulate the transversal skills needed in a world facing the challenges captured by the SDGs. How to design and implement CBL poses many challenges for teachers, providers of education and training as well as for the students / learners participating in this new type of programmes/courses.
In this project, we aim to develop an intra-curricular challenge-based course for the Educational Science & Technology (EST) programme. The EST curriculum offers theoretical and practical knowledge about education and learning in schools and organizations. The programme aims to develop students with interdisciplinary skills capable of collaborating with wide-ranging stakeholders. To develop these skills, a new challenge-based course will be designed in which students will integrate other disciplinary perspectives to tackle a complex/wicked issue. The challenge addressed is related to different sorts of educational problems that real-life stakeholders in educational institutions or in companies providing in-house training or workplace learning experience. Examples are: How can we design transformative teaching practices in higher education?; How can we effectively support day-to-day formal and informal learning for vocationally-educated employees? And how do we support these practices by means of technology and other facilities? To develop this new course, we will collaborate with ECIU, teachers and educational consultants (e.g., CELT, UniPed, TEC Monterrey). The development of this project will also allow us to explore innovative systemic models of implementing flexible, sustainable education and to enhance institutional uptake.
Expected outcomes
Fully-designed and ready-to-implement CBL course for the EST programme in which innovative educational methods, pedagogies, and frameworks through micromodules will be offered to develop an interdisciplinary and international challenge-based experience facilitating, inter alia, the development of transversal and interdisciplinary skills of students from different disciplines. Multifactor assessment plan for challenge-based assignments and micromodules
involved researchers
Tessa Eijsink (EST)
Dr. Marcella Hoogeboom (OWK) - Contact person
Ben Jongbloed (CHEPS)
Gianluca Ambrosi (EST)
Olga Karageorgiou (UIF)
Ryan Wakamiya (S&P)
Luuk Buunk (CELT)
Dag Husebo/Tim Marshall/Masoumeh Shahverdi (University of Stavanger)
Duration of the project
May 2023 – December 2023
Funding & partners
CBL-CES
publications and presentations related to this project
Not applicable