Motivation on Problem Based Learning

Introduction

The new context of the European Area for Higher Education (García-García et al., 2009) and the current social environment marked by new technologies imply that new Telecommunication Engineers must be trained not only in technical knowledge but also in the professional skills that they must use in their professional life (Cajander & Daniels, 2011). The effectiveness of hands-on experience to produce meaningful learning has been clearly demonstrated, for example (Gil et al., 2010), (Martínez et al., 2012), indicating the need to train university students in specific professional skills. Over the last few years the ABET engineering criteria (ABET, 2013) have served as a guideline to develop professional skills in order to achieve this. In Problem-based learning (De los Ríos et al., 2010) (Kartal & Bakaç, 2010), students are confronted with an open-ended, ill-structured, authentic (real-world) problem, whereas Project-based learning begins with an assignment that must lead to the production of a final product—a design, a model, a device or a computer simulation. The former method is always active and collaborative and, typically, involves significant amounts of self-directed learning on the part of the students.

This methodology, PBL, as a teaching strategy and curricular design began at the McMaster University School of Medicine in Canada in 1969. Using problems based on actual clinical cases as focal points in a medical program evolved after years of medical faculty and student frustration with the traditional lectures and challenging clinical experiences. Imparting and absorbing the immense amount of content inherent in a medical education was becoming more unrealistic and improbable. Drawing from the tutorial process developed by Barrows (Barrows, 1985), (Barrows, 1988), (Barrows, 1971), (Barrows, 1980), (Barrows, 1996) the medical curriculum shifted from a faculty-centered approach to a student-centered, interdisciplinary process. Starting from this initial learning strategy, many schools in different parts of the world have adopted this methodology usually with some variations to suit their local needs. However, the spread of the methodology was not homogenous all over the world. Whereas in North America the impact of PBL was very strong, due to the long academic traditions of American colleges and universities with their focus on personal development of students, the inclusion of PBL in Europe was very different.

The first European PBL curriculum was introduced in 1974 in the University of Maastricht (The Netherlands) Medical School. This medical school was founded in that year, with the explicit mission to explore innovative forms of teaching and they implemented the PBL as the main learning strategy in their courses. Today, PBL is widely spread in different fields of higher education. A complete review of the works done with PBL in the first 25 years of the methodology can be found in (Albanese & Mitchell, 1993), (Norman & Schmidt, 1992), (Mohd-Yusof et al., 2011).