The Emerald Handbook of Challenge Based Learning

This chapter presents a case study of building TU/e innovation Space, a unique learning hub for developing, sustaining, and disseminating research-informed challenge-based learning (CBL) practices at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). This learning hub for education innovation fosters the collaboration between students, industry, research, and societal organizations and drives the continued development of the CBL approach at TU/e. The chapter presents insights from the development of CBL at TU/e innovation Space, drawn from postcourse evaluation surveys of two flagship courses, the innovation Space Bachelor End Project (ISBEP; third year bachelor level) and the innovation Space Project (ISP; master's course level). Analysis of the data shows that students generally rated the courses highly. As the main motivation to choose these courses, students cited the desire to do something else than their own major, aiming for interdisciplinarity and breadth of knowledge, and wanting to do something real-life or business-like. Students also liked the ability to choose their own project, but in some cases, struggled with the structure of the assessment. We also briefly describe academics' perspective on running CBL courses at the hub and present additional activities related to the full learning ecosystem of the hub. Finally, we describe some of the future directions in terms of CBL research and educational developments at the hub.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a trending educational concept in engineering education. The literature suggests that there is a growing variety in CBL implementations, stemming from the flexible and abstract definition of CBL that is shaped by teachers' perceptions. The chapter discusses how the CBL concept has been developed at Eindhoven University of Technology and describes the development and use of two educational resources aimed to facilitate conceptualization, design, and research of CBL for curriculum designers and teachers. The first resource is a set of CBL design principles for framing the variety of CBL and providing teachers with advice about how to develop CBL courses within an overall CBL curriculum. The second resource is a curriculum-mapping instrument called the CBL compass, which aims at mapping CBL initiatives and identifying gaps, overlaps, and misalignments in CBL implementation at a curriculum level. Both CBL design principles and the CBL compass have been developed by combining insights from theory and practical examples of CBL at TU/e into a higher order model of vision, teaching and learning, and support. We discuss the two educational instruments and showcase their application in the Eindhoven Engineering Education (E³) program, and we discuss preliminary findings and insights. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future practice and research.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a didactic technique that aims to increase the knowledge and skills development of higher education students. The different situations that humanity faces make educational models evolve and adapt to reality and force faculty to be increasingly prepared and open to face current problems. The Tecnológico de Monterrey, the highest ranked private university in Mexico and the 155th in the world (QS World University Rankings, 2021), has implemented the Tec21 Educational Model based on four fundamental pillars: (1) CBL; (2) flexibility; (3) inspiring faculty; and (4) integrated and memorable education experiences. In this chapter, we describe the experience of implementing this education model. Our conclusions so far are that students acquire more knowledge in CBL classes than in face-to-face classes; however, faculty require an adequate training program, and there must be a prior design of the competency assessment instruments. Testing of various assessment instruments found that checklists and rubrics are the most accepted, appropriate, objective, and transparent in CBL courses, based on faculty and students' surveys. Finally, in the opinion of employers, students educated with CBL as a didactic technique have greater acceptance in the working world.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) has gained acceptance as a contemporary and progressive teaching pedagogy that provides a holistic and inclusive experience to learners in higher education (HE) institutions. However, its lack of appeal to non-STEM subjects and the need for further development, particularly concerning improved approaches, have been recognized. It seems that CBL runs the risk of becoming a portmanteau pedagogy that blends aspects of problem-based learning, project-based learning, and situated learning, as opposed to its development as an effective pedagogy tool. This points to a lack of a formal implementation framework, code of practice, and standard procedures for its delivery. We argue that blending a design thinking (DT) pedagogy with CBL can potentially provide the stability that CBL currently lacks. At the same time, it also presents a more inclusive proposition to potential non-STEM audiences. Thus, in this chapter, we seek to interrogate the intersectionality between CBL and DT literature in the context of HE teaching and learning with a view of establishing CBL as a pedagogy in its own right. We attempt to achieve this by systematically analyzing the separate literature to reveal the synergies and common touchpoints.

Finance courses are major offerings in UK business schools, at various levels. Seldom do these courses move beyond theoretical modeling and textbook approaches. This is corroborated by the paltry literature on challenge-based learning (CBL) in the finance arena.

In this chapter, we describe the experience of implementing an investment fund designed by experienced members of staff and set up and run by students in one of the UK business schools in 2018. The seed capital of the Fund was donated by a variety of sources and has enabled students to use this as a jump start for their investment skills. The ethos of the Fund is not to teach students just how to invest but to put students in a real-life investment setting where they deal with the running of day-to-day activities of managing investments through a practical framework. In doing so they discover, adapt, and apply theoretical models to funds while preparing performance reports. Students have been successful in getting jobs by demonstrating their involvement, and the Fund has put them in touch with investment banks and future employers. The functioning of the Fund is analyzed in this chapter.

The chapter suggests the practical steps involved in setting up such a schema of CBL, which might aid other higher education institutions and promote entrepreneurial, creative, and team building activity.

As the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has stated in their original definition of quality (ISO 8402:1994), quality is “the totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs.” The authors consequently believe that not only learning from challenges – the relevant entity – should be intended as a task aimed to satisfy the needs of both challenged learners and challenged businesses, but also that not all the entity's needs are stated from the beginning of the process.

These were the methodological assumptions of a workshop on destination management held from October 2020 to February 2021 in the frame of tourism studies at the University of Bergamo. Though the workshop was entirely run through digital channels in a time of pandemic, it successfully provided five destination management organizations (DMOs) and an association among hosts in the Bergamo Alps with a variety of digital communication products.

The workshop was special in terms of satisfaction expressed by participants as well as the involved DMOs. The participants' deliveries became active components of the destinations' policies. A professional video came as a welcome addition.

Implied needs which the workshop came across – namely, doubts on the reliability of tourism data, cooperation among local actors, prerequisites in building a new website, the role of food and recipes in promoting a destination identity, best practices in guiding guests through planned itineraries, and the role of a city administration in controlling overtourism – were identified while researching and producing.

Since 2009, different challenge-based learning (CBL) activities have been implemented at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), with a shared objective: provide the students a learning experience that covers the acquisition of technical knowledge, soft skills, and other generic competences, while bringing them closer to the current technologies and industry. The shared background of these activities is the participation of Master's students of aerospace engineering in the preliminary design of a space mission. During the 18/19 academic year, the UPM participated in the 2018 ESA Concurrent Engineering Challenge (ESA CEC), where the students complemented their technical knowledge with dedicated training in Concurrent Engineering and learnt how ESA assesses the feasibility of real space missions. This experience further motivated the organization of the UPM CEC, which was first executed in the 19/20 academic year (and is expected to be carried out in future courses). After a decade implementing CBL, different research methodologies and instruments have been used to evaluate its impact on different aspects of the learning process. In this chapter, we describe the main CBL activities performed, focusing on the instruments used to evaluate them. We draw attention to the main advantages and disadvantages of implementing CBL from a learning perspective, as well as the associated impact in the student's motivation and student–teacher relationship. In many cases, different teaching scenarios are assessed, thus making it possible to compare CBL against traditional methods.

In this chapter, we show how to use challenge-based learning (CBL) in Operations Management (OM) education, with a focus on Industry 4.0 technologies. CBL is a cutting-edge educational approach that integrates traditional learning modules (theory and practice) to real-life challenges that require solutions. The UoL4.0 Challenge is an initiative that implements CBL in an English university. In there, an OM module was designed to provide the necessary theoretical and practical knowledge to solve challenges concerning digital technology implementations within real organizations. This chapter explores the effectiveness of UoL4.0 Challenge in providing opportunities for experiential learning and evaluates the appropriateness of CBL to develop twenty-first-century skills. Results suggest that the proposed CBL approach is an experiential learning approach that may increase students' understanding of OM in real-life settings and can be conducive to students' development of twenty-first-century skills, including critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.

Challenge-based learning (CBL), the experiential learning and pedagogical approach through which learners (students, instructors, companies, stakeholders, communities) are actively involved in designing a sustainable solution for a real-world problem, is gaining momentum in various higher education institutions around the world. Despite this multiplication of learning initiatives, evaluation in CBL is still an overlooked topic both by scholars and practitioners. Moreover, assessment is closely linked to the teaching and learning process and can also influence the evolution of the challenge because it is directly involved in the feedback, teamwork, and relationship between students, instructors, challenge providers, and stakeholders. Explaining why assessment is so important in CBL is one of the objectives of this chapter. Therefore, in line with the spirit of the handbook, the aim of this chapter is also to inspire, and give suggestions and tools for novel ways of assessing the learning process in CBL.

Through a challenge launched by the University of Trento, involving a local nonprofit integrative health fund, we understood the importance to integrate the formative with the summative assessment, to evaluate not only the final results but also the learning process. We experienced the fundamentals and the difficulties of self-directed learning through which students are called to codesign their learning experience, monitor teamwork, and assess their progress. Support and guidance from instructors are required to be successful in this cultural shift through which teachers are no more traditional professors and students are finally the experts in the challenge.

The chapter presents the implementation of ethics education via challenge-based learning (CBL) in three European settings. At TU Eindhoven (the Netherlands), a mandatory first-year User, Society, and Enterprise course on the ethics and history of technology offers a CBL alternative on ethics and data analytics in collaboration with internal student and research teams. The University of Lübeck (Germany) initiated the project CREATE – Challenge-based Learning for Robotics Students by Engaging Start-Ups in Technology Ethics, which enables 60 students in Robotics and Autonomous Systems to integrate ethical and societal considerations into technological development processes, in cooperation with start-ups from a local accelerator. In Spain, CBI-Fusion Point brings together 40 students from business and law (ESADE), engineering and technology (Polytechnic University of Catalonia), and design (IED Barcelona Design University) for an innovation course focused on the application of CERN-developed technologies to real-world problems. The chapter documents the process of setting up three CBL courses that engage students with grand societal topics which require the integration of ethical concerns from the design stage of technological development. The authors also reflect on the challenges of teaching ethics via CBL and the lessons they learned by delivering experiential learning activities rooted in real-life challenges and contexts marked by high epistemic uncertainty. The contribution reflects the transition to remote teaching and presents strategies employed to enhance online communication and collaboration. The chapter thus provides guidance for instructors interested in teaching ethics via CBL and recommends further lines for action and research.

This chapter reinforces that challenge-based learning (CBL) may present students with the opportunity to act on a global issue at the local level and make a positive difference in their community. This chapter presents a theoretical framework on the importance of linking Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with the CBL methodology. In addition, a method is proposed to incorporate SDGs in the development and solution of challenges related to academic activities, taking as a reference a course of the Tec21 Educational Model, whose objective was to propose sustainable solutions to challenges of municipalities in Mexico. Therefore, SDGs are an effective vehicle for the generation of challenges both by strategic partners and by governmental organizations or NGOs that together with academics can take as a basis on CBL experiences.

CBL supported by SDGs is focused on solving problems that the students identified in their community, or the place where they live or the municipality from which they or their families originate. The SDGs are global challenges that affect students and teachers locally and, therefore, it is important to use them as a reference framework in universities and generate sustainable and innovative solutions while promoting active and multidisciplinary learning.

This chapter analyzes the way in which challenge-based learning (CBL) is conceptualized and used in a private university in Puebla, Mexico, to promote social innovation. The university has recently changed its educational model, incorporating more integrative teaching and learning methodologies. The university has considered the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially the first goal to end poverty and the 10th regarding reducing inequality. These goals are relevant because the university is located in the state of Puebla, which has ranked fifth in the country (out of 32) in terms of poverty, especially in rural areas, where 58% of the population is living in poverty or extreme poverty conditions (CONEVAL, 2018). An example of a successful CBL project will be presented, showing how students have worked with their professors, community experts, and other stakeholders. In 2020, the university was recognized by the Times Higher Education World University Ranking as the number one university in Mexico to fight poverty based on the United Nations SDGs because of its CBL activities and social projects. Through these projects, students, administrators, and professors put into practice and develop different skills such as teamwork, analysis, facing new realities, innovating to design solutions to the problems in their environment, and beyond.

In this chapter, we present our findings and ideas regarding the involvement of external partners in challenge-based learning (CBL). In particular, we address two questions: Firstly, whether it is inevitably necessary and/or worthwhile to work with external partners. Secondly, in case external partners are to be included in CBL, what needs to be considered in order to make the cooperation rewarding for teachers and students. Therefore, we identify different roles external partners may assume as well as benefits and problems that can arise from this in terms of the implementation and learning process. Our insights are based on qualitative expert interviews with five teachers and three students from courses with and without external partners at the Hamburg University of Technology (a subsample of our larger quantitative and qualitative study on CBL implementation within the ECIU), our own experience in teaching CBL, as well as on literature reviews. Our findings suggest that roles and functions of external partners are various: They may come into play as a training partner, as a challenge provider, as an expert in the field and/or as a feedback provider. They may take over several roles at the same time or just one out of it; they may be defined as part of the team of learners or join in at special occasions only. While there are certain advantages unique to having external partners, some roles may also be covered without (permanently) involving externals. In any case, working with externals requires continuous communication and negotiation regarding role expectations, positions, and activities throughout the process. To facilitate this, the chapter introduces a model to systematically analyze and balance interactions with external partners.

This chapter explores the key role of industry partners in the adoption of challenge-based learning (CBL) in higher education institutions (HEIs). Considering that one defining feature of CBL is the use of real-world challenges situated within an authentic real-world context or scenario, partnerships that include students, academics, and industry partners are often established. These partnerships usually involve students, academics, and industry partners working together to define challenges, create and implement solutions, and provide feedback. Existing CBL literature has largely focused on the evaluation of challenges and benefits for students and academics, including disciplinary knowledge acquisition and the development of competencies and soft skills. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the expected input from industry partners, as well as their perceptions and benefits that they can gain from CBL partnerships. Thus, the focus of this chapter is on discussing industry partners' perceptions of the practical challenges, as well as potential opportunities that can translate into benefits, stemming from CBL partnerships. Based on empirical evidence, the chapter summarizes the current challenges of CBL within the context of HEIs. We discuss industry partners' perceptions of the practical challenges and the potential opportunities emerging from the CBL partnership, and whether these translate into benefits. We consider the practicalities of working across academia, industry, and government on the implementation of CBL, and the lessons for HEIs seeking to develop CBL activities to support innovation in their regions.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) is assumed to be particularly relevant in training future teachers, as an active learning approach, centered on the student, based on the resolution of scientific/societal challenges in interdisciplinary teams, with external partners, and over three stages (involving, investigating, and act).

The global aim of the “Form@tive – train future teachers to teach children through CBL” project is to promote active learning based on challenges, integrating different curricular units (CUs) of a course, through CBL. The Form@tive project has concluded the first cycle of implementation in early 2021, in two stages, the first in the context of a Degree in Basic Education in the academic year 2019/2020 and the second stage in three educational professional master's degrees. The results of the monitoring process of the first cycle of implementation state, among other aspects, the need: (1) of better communication between the teachers of the different CUs involved; (2) for the solutions developed to be actually implemented (not implemented due to the pandemic situation); (3) to be provided a more individualized orientation (a dedicated tutor for each group); (4) of less demand on teaching load (overload of tasks requested simultaneously); (5) to be developed not only during a semester but along the academic year; and (6) to also include the Technology and Arts filed, since it could benefit the creation of more innovative and appealing resources and presentations, among others. Recommendations for training future teachers to teach children through CBL are, thus, presented and discussed in this chapter.

This chapter provides a critical discussion of challenge-based learning (CBL) within future trends in higher education (HE). It explores how CBL may address challenges facing higher education institutions (HEIs) in response to these future trends by using a framework of common CBL characteristics. Clear recommendations for CBL practitioners to succeed in CBL implementation within the ever-changing HE landscape are presented. It complements previous chapters on CBL case studies by situating CBL in the broader HE space. A discussion on the interrelationships between these characteristics and predictions on the future integration of CBL in HE concludes this chapter. These macrolevel discussions of CBL will be of interest to government officials, managers, business stakeholders, teachers, policy advisors, and academic teachers. Insights on the future institutional impact of CBL, how it may improve business and academic collaborations, how it aligns with sustainability and transversal skills policies, and where CBL is situated in the post-COVID-19 landscape are discussed. Ultimately, it argues that CBL is part of a pedagogical toolkit to meet future trends in HE.