Reflections on Problem-based Learning: More than a Learning Methodology

I was particularly drawn to this year's PBL seminar organised by the Republic Polytechnic which places special emphasis on operationalising PBL in the context of the workplace. Apart from inviting Prof. Kolmos, who is the Unesco Chair for PBL from Aalsbrough University, another keynote speaker who touched specifically on workplace PBL was Ms Sabrina Koh from Jurong Health. I was pretty excited to hear from Ms Koh, who was a formal healthcare practitioner and is currently one of the faculty members implementing the PBL approach in healthcare simulation training. Educational and learning principles and practices could not be be purely derived from theories and researches; hence, nothing beats hearing from a practitioner-researcher who not only understands the theoretical groundings of learning and sees the application issues in actual implementation on the ground.

Of course, the first keynote which underscored  macro perspectives and trends of PBL on a global level could not be ignored totally. Typically, educators viewed PBL as yet another pedagogical approach or methodology that aims to accentuate the learning process in helping learners gain awareness of their cognitive dispositions, work effectively in teams and develop an epistemic appreciation that knowledge and or solution to the problem is not absolute and subjected to the pressure of groups opinions, changing contextual influences and governed by personal judgement and decision-making predispositions. 

I would like to agree with the general understanding to a certain extent. While PBL is indeed an approach coined earlier by Barrows (1980) in medical school training, I would purport that it has far reaching impacts on organisations' learning and development as a whole in terms of workplace learning. PBL, if implemented carefully at all the system levels within an organisation, not only changes the way learning takes place in he organisation, but collectively at an organisational level, it could radicalise the way organisations tackle and perform its core functions. All these are possible based on a simple condition: the use of problems as triggers to the learning process. How do we then define 'problems'? I will provide a simple answer to this - Any situation that arises could be a potential problem, be it a practical, theoretical or hypothetical problem. Hence, it follows that employees in organisations are trained to mitigate 'problems'. A problem need not necessary be linked with negative connotation; it could simply be a situation that disrupts the norm, or hypothetical issue that has yet to happen (in the case of strategic planning) etc. Henceforth, the effects of adopting PBL in fact, permeates all levels of functions and influences the organisational culture and beliefs as well. Scaling this hypothesis down a little, one could imagine how the attitudes and beliefs of employees could be shaped by PBL. Employees attuned to PBL would approach issues with a fundamental believe that there's more than one correct and absolute way to solivng an issue and that sometimes even the experts don't have the answers. They will be forced to thoroughly examine he situation, source for relevant information, make sense of them and apply the most plausible solution to the issue. Often times, a resolution could not even be reached. Employees are required then to deal with the tentative nature and fluidity and even complexity of the situation and adapt possible resolutions along the way.

In any case, I thought that PBL is the way forward to prepare learners to face the challenging and complex world and I am glad that RP has realise this.