Stages of project development in Challenge Based Learning (CBL)

Interested in adopting Challenge Based #Learning in your course? Check out this recent article by Gunter Bombaerts and me in The European Journal of Engineering Education: we describe how a project unfolds and the student group processes that teachers can pay attention to at each project phase.

Some interesting findings:

1. We identify 7 distinct phases in the temporal structure of a CBL project: gaining client know-how, articulating a problem, mapping the problem context, setting the aim, proposing an action path, testing and evaluating it, and implementing the solution.

2. Each #project phase involves distinct student process behaviours, which we displayed via a Sankey diagram.

3. Project phases are non-linear: students revised their approach as the project was developing. They revisited the problem formulation and its aim as they improved their technical analysis and consideration of ethical criteria, values, stakeholder needs, and client constraints

4. Project phases also had varying emphasis on group and individual work. While joint team processes were more marked in the initial phases, phases 5 and 6 showed division of tasks based on students’ strengths and affinities with either ethics or technical processes.

5. To research project development processes, we employed a thematic #trajectory analysis for each student group using course observations, reflections and interviews. The research protocol for data collection can be downloaded at this link.

6. This is a shortitudinal #research study. Unlike #longitudinal research, it has shorter intervals for data collection. This design is so suitable for classroom research and the dynamic nature of education! We hope that our detailed study description can encourage others.

7. Why consider CBL in your #teaching? CBL projects are authentic, ill-structured and open-ended, ambiguous, collaborative, sociotechnical, interactive, embedded and embodied in the university ecosystem. All these features make CBL a complex pedagogy to prepare for workplace.

8. There are several CBL frameworks, each with different phases. According to stefano perna , , the most popular framework is the one developed for Apple by Nichols, Cator, and Torres, which consists of three phases - Engage, Investigate, and Act - divided into several sub-phases. The framework has been adopted in various institutional settings across the world, such as Dublin City University (Dr. Fiona O'Riordan, Clare Gormley ) or Hamburg University of Technology and is at the basis of the TEC21 Model of Technological University of Monterrey (please see the work of CBL leader Jorge Membrillo-Hernández ), as well as the Challenge Based Learning Framework of the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (Gianluca Ambrosi, Eduardo Hermsen) and the corresponding CBL ECIU Toolkit developed by University of Twente (Adina Imanbayeva). Under the name of Challenge Based Instruction, researchers from Vanderbilt, Northwestern-Harvard and MIT Engineering Research Center (VaNTH ERC) developed the STAR Legacy Cycle which has 6 phases.

Our article examines the process behaviours in CBL project development empirically.

9. The course described in the article was a coruse on Ethics and Data Analytics coordinated by Gunter Bombaerts at TU Eindhoven, with Adam Watkins as the Data Analytics teacher and Jeff White as ethics teacher. Students worked on smart #mobility, smart #energy and smart #health real-life projects brought by partners active in the university ecosystem. Reach out to us if you want to hear more about the course.

CBL is a teaching approach growing in popularity, but pretty difficult to implement. The community of engineering teachers definitely needs more empirical articles to understand student work in CBL. Have you been integrating CBL in your teaching? Have you published empirical articles or case studies on CBL implementation? Please share links to your articles in the comments, with a few words on main findings, and hopefully this post can become a resource that teachers interested in CBL can find useful.

We are looking forward to hearing your experiences, challenges, and thoughts about our article!