I haven’t been using PBL in my courses before so I am not familiar with it. When I started to read about it I realized that it was more complicated than that.
The articles provided by the ONL181 course were quite interesting. It was nice to have the first article by Davidson, Major & Michaelsen that introduced us to the other articles. You quickly got a good picture of what the different methods are about.
I found the articles about Team-Based Learning most interesting. I have used flipped classroom as a pedagogical method in some of my courses, but now I actually have another name for it – Team-Based Learning. I have thought about the same questions as Wallace, Walker, Braseby & Sweet has about how I can assess if the students are prepared when coming to my classes, and methods or activities that would be the most effective to deepening their understanding. I googeled for some more information and found an organization of educators “Team-Based Learning Collaborative” and I think I will join that organization. Citation of their introduction page: “The Team-Based Learning Collaborative connects you to an international network of people who are knowledgeable and passionate about Team-Based Learning, and that offers teaching resources as well as professional development, to make your life as an educator more rewarding, interesting, and fun.”
We had our first PBL group meeting online this week. I am a part of a great group and I am sure we will have some interesting months ahead with plenty of work but also lots of laughs. Since we are all working day time, we will probably mostly utilize cooperative learning when working with our topics, but we need to meet online too and I guess that will be collaborative learning as a method.
I like the thoughts of Kagan about the chewing gum; that we need to chew our gum really good to maximize our learning! The neuroscience approach to learning is really interesting (well, I am a nurse so this approach to learning makes sense to me). He discusses the cooperative method, but if I understood his acronym PIES corect, the last principle is close to or basicly the same as collaborative learning?
Read some of the articles about collaborative learning and found the article of Cooper & Robinson most interesting. The cognitive scaffolds, temporarily supports, could be used in our PBL group when we have our online meetings to make sure everyone are on the same page.
REFERENCES
Cooper, J. L., Robinson, P. 2014. Using classroom assessment and cognitive scaffolding to enhance the power of small-group learning. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 149-161
Davidson, N., Major, C. H., Michaelsen L. K. 2014. Small-Group Learning in Higher Education— Cooperative, Collaborative, Problem-Based, and Team-Based Learning:
An Introduction by the Guest Editors. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 1-6
Kagan, S. 2014. Kagan Structures, Processing, and Excellence in College Teaching. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 119-138
Team-Based Learning Collaborative. http://www.teambasedlearning.org/
Wallace M., Walker J., Braseby A. & Sweet M. 2014. “Now, What Happens During Class?” Using Team-Based Learning to Optimize the Role of Expertise Within the Flipped Classroom. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), 253-273
Picture in the blog taken from the Oxford University press. English Language Teaching Global Blog. https://oupeltglobalblog.com/2018/02/19/flipped-classroom-approach/
