Challenge-based Learning
by Jim & Kathi Lengel and Molly Dubois

Objectives

• Experience challenge-based learning on your iPad.
• Understand how challenge-based learning works.
• Develop a challenge-based learning experience for your students.

Prerequisites

• Successful completion of the Meet Your iPad workshop.
• Familiarity and experience with the iPad, its built-in apps, Keynote, Pages, iMovie, and iBooks.
• Full configuration of the Mail app on your iPad, successful use of an iTunes account with Apple ID to download apps.
• Successful experience using the iPad for teaching and learning.

Experience Challenge-based Learning

Working in a group of three, choose one of the following challenges, or design your own*.

• The High Cost of Textbooks: What's the solution?
  • Parents, students, and government leaders complain of the rising cost of high school and college textbooks. What might be done to make the cost of learning materials more reasonable?
• Vacancy Rates: How can we fill those rooms?
  • Each night, hundreds of hotel rooms in your fair city are vacant, producing no revenue for the hotel, and no taxes for the government. What can be done to fix this?
• Did you Vote? How can we increase democratic participation?
  • Many citizens never register to vote, and the turnout is not what it should be. How can we increase participation?

Use your iPads to explore the challenge you have chosen, gather relevant information, discuss possible ideas, and prepare a 10-minute presentation of your conclusions. As you do this, you might want to:

• Divide the work among the members of the group.
• Seek out a variety of information on the topic, from a wide array of sources. Include both factual and opinion sources.
• Determine if this is a challenge worth facing -- is it really a problem? For whom? Is it worth solving?
• Gather information in text, images, audio, and video.
• Prepare a presentation that:
  • Proves to your audience that this is indeed a challenge worth facing.
  • Includes reliable evidence, in text and image, fact and authoritative opinion, to support your conclusions.
  • Sets forth a call to action that compels the audience to take on the challenge.
  • Employs as many iPad powers and possibilities as you can reasonably include.
• Discuss your progress along the way with your workshop leader.
• Make your presentation to the entire class.
• Critique the presentations of the other groups. See Evaluating Multimedia Projects for some help with this task.

Discuss Challenge-based Learning

Your workshop facilitator will lead a discussion of the nature of challenge-based learning and its educational possibilities in your setting. Questions will include:

• What is Challenge-based Learning?
  • Consult the Challenge-based Learning web site to see examples.
  • Download the Challenge-based Learning Classroom Guide to iBooks, and learn how CBL works.
• What is the teacher's role in CBL experience?
• What are the key features of challenge-based learning?
• How does CBL differ from the traditional way of organizing and teaching the curriculum?
• What's the role of the iPad in CBL?

Design a Challenge

• Look through your syllabus or course outline for an opportunity to substitute an iPad-using, challenge-based learning project for an existing course. For ideas on how to approach this, see Digital Opportunities.
• Design a CBL assignment to fill this opportunity. Use the ideas in the Challenge-based Learning Classroom Guide and from the Challenge-based Learning web site.
  • Write your CBL assignment with enough detail and direction that your students will be able to follow it.
  • Try to include as many powers of the iPad as possible in designing the CBL assignment. Consider the iPad as a library, an organizer, a teacher, and a communicator.
  • Your plan should include: (see page 5 of the Challenge-based Learning Classroom Guide.)
    • A Big Idea
    • An Essential Question
    • A Challenge
    • Guiding Questions, Activities, and Resources
    • How you'll evaluate the Solutions
  • Discuss your assignment idea with your workshop facilitator and your colleagues at the workshop.
• Produce a video with iMovie that introduces your CBL assignment to your students. It should answer the questions:
  • Why are we doing this challenge?
  • How will we proceed?
  • What's the end result?

Reflection

Your workshop facilitator will engage you in a reflection of the role of CBL in education, and the role of the iPad therein.

Workshop Evaluation for Jim

Workshop Evaluation for Kathi

Workshop Evaluation for Molly

Further Reading

• Assessing the Effectiveness of Problem‑Based Learning in Higher Education: Lessons from the Literature
• Problem-Based Learning in Business Education: Curriculum Design and Implementation Issues
• Collaborative project-based learning and problem-based learning in higher education: a consideration of tutor and student roles in learner-focused strategies
• Problem-based Learning (wikipedia overview)
• Problem Based Learning Projects: Initiatives Of The New England Board Of Higher Education Organization
• Project-Based Learning (from Power to Learn)
• Challenge-based Learning.org (K-12 directory of challenges)

 

Design your own challenge

A good challenge-based learning assignment begins with a question that:

• is worth looking into.
• demands information and ideas from many sources to find its answer.
• can be answered in many different ways.
• can't be answered easily by looking it up in Google.
• might take the questioner in many different directions.
• reasonable people have disagreed on how best to approach searching for an answer.
• in the search for its answer, will cause the student to confront key ideas in your course.