HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010

My PBL experience

Hi PBL bloggers,

At last I could participate in McMaster Visitor's blog. I have been making a begginers' mistake. I did not accept (click) Alberto's invitation.

Anyway, I feel that this blog is a nice site to keep into touch with each other and share our experiences in this subject we met in McMaster: PBL. Then, I would like to share my experience so far.

Some weeks ago I sent a message complaining about the poor participation of my students. But, I did not give up. And little by little participation is increasing.

I am using two type of activities to implement active learning with a total of 13 students:

1) A PBL activity: I asked them to make a basic design of a Combined Cycle Power Plant of 800 MW in groups of three. This requires to learn about how electricity is produced by vapour turbines and gas turbines. Those items correspond to two important topics in the syllabus, which have been traditionally teached by an speech of one or two hours and by solving a list of typical well defined problems (they only had to solve a energy balance equation to find out the value of one unknown variable).

As resources for it I programmed:

• 14 classes of 1 hour each,
• a reference book (there are about 10 copies in the library),
• a guide of the learning objectives
• a visit to a combined cycle power plant of 800 MW near University after of 8 hours classes.

I tried to make short tutorials to check the progress of each group (3 groups of 3 members and 1 group of 4 members). What I found is:

• From the beginning all the groups except one were able to learn themselves from the reference book and from internet, and they could plan the schedule they should follow in order to solve the problem.
• One of the groups found quick information and a flowchart of the process in internet, and next day they did not know how to follow. I suggested them to indentify the reasons the flowchart was like it.
• 3 of the groups tried to learn as much as possible about vapour and gas turbines and their cycles, and made a draft of the flowchart of the combined cycle plant before the visit to the real plant.
• Because of this, I was expecting that student would make lots of questions in the plant, but they did not. This was one of my complain in my message. Later on, I could check in the tutorials, they took note of all the data they need.
• They found very useful the visit, and especially all the their preparation about the subject before the visit.
• Only one group did not know how to face the problem. In the tutorials their participation was very poor.
• Student are surprised about the mass of water and gas they need to produce 800 MW. At the beginning they though they had miscalculated. The main reason is that the book’s examples used much lower powers.
• However they could compare the average values of operating conditions used in the books’ examples and the real plant were very similar, independently of the power required.

After 14 our of classes for PBL, I went on the next topics by the traditional way (lectures + a list of well defined problem solving), although the did not finished the project. I tried the student to participate in the lectures and problem solving classes, but with poor success (only two student usually paticipate). That was just a week or twe after McMaster, and also was part of my complaint. I did also other activities, I will tried to explain another time. But in December, I could feel the students actitude was changing and their participation was increasing. Between 4 and 6 more student started participating.

The reason was they felt more self-confident in the traditional problem solving classes, because they found they way to solve such problems were very similar to that of the project (the relationship between variables was similar).

Then, my conclusions are as follows:

• The difference between traditional learning (lectures + a list of well defined problem solving) and my PBL is that the groups are working concentrated in one problem, but it integrates all the knowledge about the energy production, energy transfer and relation between all variables.
• Solving only one problem, they are able to find or learn what is relationship between variables and to be aware of the real values. Then they are able to self-evaluate the final results and to find if something is wrong and to identify it. In my experience so far, I could check that solving a list of well defined problems they do not get this skills.
• For the future, I thing it is good to keen students working in two or three projects or problems at the same time is beneficial, so they can find relationships between them.

The course is not finished yet, so I tried to get this information from the student in a final assessment of the course. I will keep you informed. Any comment to improve?


That is all by the moment. Best wihses for all of you for 2010

With love,

Asier

Our first article on PBL.

Hello everybody:

Isabel and I are proud to announce you that our first paper on PBL is in press (Title: Paternity testing in a PBL environment). Yesterday we sent back e-proofs to editor. It is going to be published in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education (John Wiley Publishers).
We hope to have  two more papers finished and sent by the end of 2009. We can't  stop the spirit of McMaster!!! (Ice wine, may be?).

Best wishes,

Alberto

Yes, we can!

A famous slogan to say we can introduce new entries in this blog.
Thank you very much, Alberto.

Now, you can write down new entries (so do I hope)

Hello,
Digging in the blog, I have sent to all of you a message inviting to be a participant, it is to say, you should be able to write down a new entry, not just a comment after one of my entries.
Please let me know if you can.

Maastricht versus McMaster

Liduina has sent us an interesting comment and I think it must be included in this blog. I hope to hear about the presentation they are going to give on the pros and cons of this system against the one they are using now.:
 Could you include the presentation here?. Best regards.

Hi everyone

What nice pictures, I have saved some of them to show them here. Asier how terrible that your students will not cooperate. Mine I must confess are quite happy with the new approach we are trying to use. In a few weeks time we are to give a presentation on the pros and cons of this system against the one we are using now (so Maastricht versus McMaster. We have already been talking about the changes we would like but of course that will take some time to get in there. But we are persistent.

Yes it would be great for you if Sue could come over, but you have seen her working so remember that and try to put that in your way of teaching. Maybe if you tell them about your experiences and why you are so enthusiastic that would help, or did you do that already? I gave my student an enthusiastic talk about Mcmasters and the differences I had spotted and the reasons why I liked it and my enthusiasm did seem to fall on them.

I hope you will not give up however, it is going to work maybe one by one but it will. Good luck and who knows maybe you ever get around to Holland, then visit by all means.

Kind regards

Liduina van Baarle