The rapidly changing workforce of the C21st places increasing demands on higher education institutions to produce graduates who possess sound academic credentials and key skills, and who furthermore demonstrate the ability to transfer knowledge and skills from their studies to the workplace. This paper begins with a definition of key/core skills,…

What if schools in the U.S. treated their innovation and emerging technologies with as much glamour as they give to athletics? At the New England Board of Higher Education's recent Advanced Manufacturing Problem Based Learning (AM PBL) Showcase, industry representatives addressed this question and discussed ways to improve the branding and appeal…

Problem Based Learning (PBL) is a learning method considered to be capable of changing the students' perception in facing the challenges of the 21st century. This study was aimed to improve soft skills in the form of critical thinking, motivation, and group dynamics and hard skills in the form of psychomotor ability by applying PBL. This study was…

This article highlights the significance of professional and disciplinary spaces in the shaping of Learning Outcomes (Los) in higher education. It is based on empirical studies of three programmes (engineering, the humanities and medicine) at two Norwegian universities. The results demonstrate both similarities and differences in the dynamics of…

The development of a student's ability to make data-driven decisions has become a focus in higher education (Schield 1999; Stephenson and Caravello 2007). Data literacy, the ability to understand and use data to effectively inform decisions, is a fundamental component of information competence (Mandinach and Gummer 2013; Stephenson and Caravello,…

This commentary begins by summarizing the five contributions to this special issue and briefly recapping the background to the topic of student learning in higher education. Narrative and systematic reviews are compared, and the relative value of different bibliographic databases in the context of systematic reviews is assessed. The importance of…

Interdisciplinary competence is important in academia for both employability and sustainable development. However, to date, there are no specific interdisciplinary education models and, naturally, no empirical studies to assess them. Since problem-based learning (PBL) and project-based learning (PjBL) are learning approaches that emphasize…

The use of problem-based learning (PBL) is gaining attention in the engineering classroom as a way to help students synthesize foundational knowledge and to better prepare students for practice. In this work, we study the discourse interactions between 27 student teams and two instructors in an engineering PBL environment to analyze how…

This book provides an archival forum for researchers, academics, practitioners, and industry professionals interested and/or engaged in the reform of the ways of teaching and learning through advancing current learning environments towards smart learning environments. It facilitates opportunities for discussions and constructive dialogue among…

Higher education faces the challenges of bridging education and authentic work. In addition, it needs to respond to the highly multimodal and participatory communication and content creation practices, preferences, and cultures of present and future students. The aim of our article is to discuss how the use of video triggers and video production…

Engaging in an online course has traditionally been perceived to be a lonely experience, with students busy viewing video lectures, working on problem sets and interacting intermittently with others using asynchronous technologies. More recently, over the past 6-7 years, online courses have become recognized as viable delivery vehicles for online…

In this article we examine the use and misuse of the term "Freirean" with respect to student-centered classrooms, flipped classrooms and problem-based learning. In doing so, we unpack teaching methods which are contrary to dialogism and yet subsumed and reported as Freirean.

With the development of the social economic conditions, society has a great change to the ability of the business management major students compare with the past, which requires colleges and universities to reform the teaching process. Combined with the relevant requirements of the project of training the talents of management major, we reform the…

This paper describes a pedagogical experiment in which a suite of novel blended learning strategies was used to replace the traditional role of design tutors in a first year architectural design studio. The pedagogical objectives, blended learning strategies and outcomes of the course are detailed. While the quality of the student design work…

Three-dimensional multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) have the potential to provide experiential learning qualitatively similar to that found in the real world. MUVEs offer a pedagogically-driven immersive learning opportunity for educationalists that is cost-effective and enjoyable. A family of digital virtual avatars was created within…