Complete thesis - Murdoch University

identified within a session. It also facilitated timely feedback – in general anything submittedon Tuesday could be back with the students by the Thursday session, and from Thursdayback on Tuesday.8.1.2 Staff developmentHitchcock (2000, p 52) suggests thesuccess of any PBL curricular initiative requires the assistance of faculty skilledin PBL.This requires academics to take the role of trained facilitators to guide the learners withoutteaching them in a traditional manner: having someone for the groups to look to for guidanceleads to a richer, more holistic level of learning (Dahlgren, 2000). Although PBL had beenapplied in the SE programme (and reported on internally through School seminars), in generalit could be said that academic staff were not deeply conversant with the approach. Due tothis unfamiliarity, a series of staff development workshops were initiated for academic staffin order to provide training and education on PBL.The staff development workshops were structured to address two separate concerns:• provide a background in PBL approaches by undertaking a PBL session – the Schoolengaged the services of Dr Sally Clarke, then in New Zealand, who had acted as mentorto the researcher during the development of the PBL version of ENG260, to facilitatea workshop on PBL. The outcome of this was an understanding of what changes wouldbe needed to enable PBL across all units, and a set of tasks to be completed by eachacademic staff member for each of the units they coordinated. Tasks included curriculummapping and problem development, amongst others. Concerns were also raised –the most critical being discipline content coverage. In addition, several staff memberswere not convinced that basic (ie foundational) knowledge could be learnt this way• an appreciation of the issues raised by such active learning – the School invited anacademic from Victoria, Dr Roger Hadgraft, who had a great deal of experience inapplying PBL in a (civil) engineering context. The result of this workshop was clearercommitment on the part of academic staff to make this work.The workshops were scheduled several months apart, so that work had commenced on therevision to units before Dr Hadgraft arrived. An advantage of this was that staff could discussissues from their experience with grappling with them.335