Background

In recent years, educational initiatives have been underway in Australasia, Europe, and North America to better prepare university students/graduates to function effectively in global environments (i.e., globally competent). Engineering and science, for example, are traditionally taught deductively, yet a widely recognized educational psychology is that people are most strongly motivated to learn things they clearly perceive a need to know. Thus, instead of beginning with general principles and applications, the instruction begins with specifics—a set of observations or experimental data to interpret, a case study to analyze, or a complex real-world problem to solve, i.e., inductive teaching and learning. This should be learner-centered and impose more responsibility on students for their own learning than the traditional lecture-based deductive approach. Inductive teaching and learning encompass a range of instructional methods, including problem-based learning, project-based learning, case-based teaching, inquiry learning, discovery learning, and just-in-time teaching. These methods involve students discussing questions and solving problems in class (i.e., active learning), with much of the work in and out of class by students working in groups (i.e., collaborative or cooperative learning) (Prince and Felder, 2006). Among these instructional methods, this CoP will focus on problem-based learning during its journey of promotion and enhancement of inductive teaching and teaching. Inductive methods promote students’ adoption of a deep (meaning-oriented) approach to learning, as opposed to a surface (memorization-intensive) approach. It also promotes intellectual development and helps university students to acquire critical thinking and self-directed learning skills that characterize desirable graduate attributes and global competence nowadays. However, it should be noted that inductive teaching can be conducted well or poorly, and university teachers implementing an inductive method should therefore familiarize themselves with best practices and provide extensive support and guidance for students’ learning experience. There is currently an information gap about the teaching experiences and available knowledge in problem-based learning at PolyU, and it is of urgent importance to set up this proposed CoP to fill in the current information gap (or void in knowledge exchange) and foster PolyU’s quality teaching and student’s development of desirable attributes as globally competent graduates.

People