A STUDY OF EDUCATOR WORKLOAD IN PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING

摘要

Problem-based Learning (PBL) has been widely used inrnvarious professional educations. But, why the movementrnof PBL advances to IT education still far behinds? Thernreason is very simple – firstly, educators under PBLrnpedagogy have much more workload and duties thanrnunder the traditional IT teaching methods, such as, PBLrnactivities design, students discussion guidance, formativernassessments and etc. Secondly, the large student numbersrnand limited staff in most of the IT undergraduaternclassrooms hinder interested IT educators to accept PBL.rnContrary, to face the new challenges of the e-Learningrngeneration, IT education ought to combine their originalrnteaching method with PBL pedagogy as a result to formrnan improved bi-directional pedagogy - when technologiesrnare ready to support more problem/solution discussionsrnonline. This paper promotes PBL for IT education. Thernstudy positions educators at the center role to inspect PBLrndiscipline from four perspectives: (1) problems (2)rnstudents (3) tutors and (4) assessments; consequently,rnsuggesting the bottleneck of PBL workload for therninterested IT educators. In this paper, to release the ITrnstaff shortage for implementing PBL pedagogy, thernconclusion has advised IT developing “computer tutors”rnfrom four perspectives, as the paper suggested, to save thernworkload for educators.