When we experiment with new forms of education, what do students really learn and from whom? And what does this mean for how we can redesign universities? In February, the EWUU educational science research team published an article in Teaching in Higher Education sharing their findings about these questions. Over the course of 2022, the research team studied two EWUU student challenges, examining how students on these challenges perceived the different roles of people they encountered in the challenges and what they learned from these people.
Transdisciplinary challenge-based learning
In the article, they introduce the concept of transdisciplinary challenge-based (T-CBL) learning to describe the innovative educational approach EWUU takes in its educational challenges. The research team found that in this type of education, students learn from a huge range of people. This is because a transdisciplinary educational model builds a collective. They can see that this type of learning is social learning, where students learn “on demand”. In education, as in parenting, it really does take a village.
Learning from students’ own network
Students said they turned to their family and friends for support on how to manage the uncertainty of the challenge or how to manage and respond to team dynamics. Students also valued Google highly to find the expertise they needed in terms of contacts or articles on disciplinary information. They found that external, non-academic experts were highly valuable to them because they contributed expertise and helped them solve a challenge. But most of all, in terms of learning, students valued their teammates the highest. This shows how important it is that challenge-based learning takes place in teams. A teams environment may be socially and emotionally challenging for students but students learn a lot in it.
Competencies
In scientific terms, the teams sees that in T-CBL students learn cognitive, meta-cognitive and affective competencies. And a new competency: perspective-taking. The full results are available in the Open Access article here: The role of academic and extra-academic actors in transdisciplinary challenge-based learning
Next questions to answer
The biggest question now is: what does this mean for the role of the academic? Do we need traditional lectures? Should academics act as guides, supporting students to find out the answers they need themselves? And test the validity of these? What does this mean for university structures and systems?
EWUU Educational Research Team (2022-2023)
- Gemma O’Sullivan, Utrecht University
- Yvette Baggen, Wageningen University & Research
- Cassandra Tho, Wageningen University & Research
- Despoina Georgiou, Utrecht University
- Heleen Pennings, University Medical Center Utrecht, and Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO)
- Antoine van den Beemt, Eindhoven University of Technology