Students’ perception of learning facilitation during an interdisciplinary engineering design course – a case study

Important engineering competencies can be developed within a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) environment. However, learning facilitation plays a major role in guiding students’ learning towards the anticipated learning outcomes. The purpose of this case study is to analyze students’ perception of learning facilitation during an interdisciplinary engineering design course delivered using a PBL approach. Based on criteria from a PBL inventory [1], students’ feedback on their PBL facilitator was collected. The results show that students’ project work led to overall positive learning outcomes. Also, students were found to show a strong preference to work as a multidisciplinary team as opposed to an interdisciplinary team. From the case considered here it can be inferred that learning facilitators may have the potential to improve formative assessments (i.e. feedback) during students’ project based learning. Furthermore, the connection of students’ project work with the anticipated learning outcomes may need to be reinforced. This is to ensure that students realize they are carrying out projects so as to learn pre-defined knowledge and skills.