Students’ experiences with challenge-based learning at TU/e innovation Space:overview of five key characteristics across a broad range of courses

Abstract

Challenge-based learning (CBL) has emerged in the last decade as a response to the complexity of problems faced by modern society, new competencies needed for the workplace, and insights from cognitive sciences on knowledge acquisition and learner motivation. In CBL, students work on real-world problems which are open-ended and require interdisciplinary knowledge and entrepreneurial mindset. In the last three years, over 70 CBL experiments have been initiated at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), in order to develop a broad range of CBL teaching practices. Half of these courses have taken place at TU/e innovation Space, which is a learning hub and expertise centre for CBL and entrepreneurship education. We use students’ evaluation surveys to analyse the experiences of Bachelor and Masters students in these courses. In particular, we are focusing on responses to five key course design characteristics set by the teaching staff as important: how interdisciplinary and challenge-based (or linked to real-life problems) the courses are, how entrepreneurial and hands-on they are, and how much they contributed to students’ personal development, as well as their team development. The results show that what attracts students to these CBL courses matches closely these five characteristics, and we discuss why this might be the case. Interestingly, some of the more hands-on aspects of the courses do not seem to have been affected by the COVID-19 disruption in the 2019-2020 academic year

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