Economy of scale for small-scale education

Title of the project
Economy of scale for small-scale education
Subtitle: Integrating multimedia in blended learning scenario's to enable small group learning at a large scale

Project team
Subgroup FHML: Bas de Leng, O&O FHML, Lead overall project and subgroup FHML
Subgroup FL: Paul Adriaans, Lead subgroup FL
Subgroup SBE: Gwen Noteborn, Lead subgroup SBE / Katerina Bohle-Carbonell, O&O
External partners: Martin Haag, University Heidelberg/Heilbronn, Chair informatics department

Financed by
UM Leading in Learning, Pillar E-factor in PBL

Project goals
Develop and implement interactive multimedia cases for different content domains (law, economics and medicine) and settings (preparatory self-study, skills training and lectures).

Project scope
At all faculties of Maastricht University we see problems undermining an active stance of students towards PBL activities in the current curricula, resulting in suboptimal achievement of student potential and suboptimal utilization of the available learning resources. These problems are:
* Scarcity of appealing authentic case material from professional practice fields and insufficient opportunities for interacting with the material in a structured and reflective way
* Insufficient support for combining different work formats (individual, pairs, subgroups etc) within one educational session and for applying these formats in a flexible way in response to individual and group performances (depending on what is actually going on during an educational session).
* Insufficient support for linking different learning opportunities (self-study, tutorial groups, skills laboratories, and lectures) scheduled over time.

To solve these bottlenecks we will develop and implement interactive multimedia cases for different content domains (law, economics and medicine) and settings (preparatory self-study, skills training and lectures). Although group work remains a face-to-face event, the student responses are executed in a web based environment enabling logging of the student activities. By means of real-time processing of the responses, follow-up learning activities can be planned on the fly based on the performances of subgroups and individuals.