Opportunities, Challenges, Tools and Helpful Relations: Development of a Model of How to foster Reflections in Higher Education

This paper presents a holistic model which can be used to help teachers to design pedagogical opportunities for meaningful reflections in higher education. Within the PBL Future initiative of Aalborg University, we worked with a group of students from different study programmes and levels. In a three-semester long process these students engaged in a series of reflective activities aimed at helping them become more aware of their professional competence developments. In an iterative process we analysed their reactions to and interactions with a set of given reflective tasks (both face-to-face and online), and with the research team. We summarise our insights into the complex dynamics of reflective processes in a model which conceptualises reflections as taking place as interplay between opportunities, challenges, tools and helpful relations, and with inspiration from the outside world

Networked Learning and PBL Future – an institutional development project

In 2018, an ambitious cross-faculty research project titled “PBL future” was launched within Aalborg University (AAU). The aim of “PBL Future” is to develop research-based directions for problem- and project-based learning (PBL) and networked learning in AAU. In AAU PBL has been implemented as an institution-wide pedagogy since AAU’s inauguration in 1974 (Kolmos, Fink, & Krogh, 2004). The project aims to re-conceptualise how PBL and networked learning could operate in new formats, based on the core principles of PBL, while exploring and developing new digital approaches that operate in and open up for new hybrid PBL and networked learning models. In the project, there are five sub-projects addressing particular aspects in relation PBL and networked learning. In this round table we will discuss three of these in more depth: Scenarios and future development in organisational change processes – methodologies and theoretical reflection Emerging PBL Collaboration Skills for a Digital Age – students’ use of networked technologies in hybrid environments PBL competence development of individual students (working with portfolio methods and digital tools) Within each of these three themes we shall discuss current findings, thinking, theories, questions, methodologies, but more importantly co-developing with the participant richer pictures of current knowledge and state-of-the-art in relation to the three themes. More concretely, this co-development will manifest itself as the production of rich-media posters to support and reify the discussion taking place in sub-groups