ePBL: Design and implementation of a Problem-based Learning environment

Abstract

Problem-based Learning (PBL) has been utilized by educators for almost half a century as a powerful and engaging student-centered pedagogy. PBL has also been employed across a wide range of disciplines and areas in education primarily medical, engineering, and business. The pedagogy that has been practiced for decades using the traditional face-to-face activities largely benefited from all the online technologies in empowering the learners in a non-classical structure. Computer technologies were exploited by researcher and educators at different capacities in order to add a value to PBL. Online implementations ranged from using basic communication tools to building fully-fledged systems and websites. Several research projects succeeded in building comprehensive, feature-rich, PBL-tailored learning environments. On the other hand, some implementation were either partially useful or inherently deficient. Although many attempts achieved attractive results, they either ended up unused or unsupported by the institution. The reasons in many cases were purely technical and not related to the suitability of the environment to the pedagogy. This paper describes the need, design, and implementation of a conceptual model to allow students to effectively collaborate using a customizable framework for PBL courses. In this paper, we present ePBL , an online environment for PBL suitable for educational institutions at any level. We also share our experiences and recommendations for developing similar pedagogy-specific solutions. We also describe the details of implementing and testing of ePBL at Qatar University. Analysis of students activities along with their feedbacks is also detailed in this paper.