Embracing Authenticity through Challenge-Based Learning in Higher Education

If you are a teacher, I am sure you can relate to the following: you have gone to great lengths to teach the contents of your course and your students turn around and ask “And how do I apply this in the rest of my life? Why is this important?” Sure, you can find answers to these questions, you could present concrete situations in which students would be able to apply what they have learned. But what if you turned it all around? What if it was not you to tell the students what to learn and when?

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is doing exactly that. In CBL, students are confronted with a real-life, authentic societal challenge and collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to identify working goals and learning needs to respond to the challenge at hand. By putting students in charge of their own learning, CBL aims to increase learning motivation, engagement, and success.

Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have made a collective decision to implement Challenge-Based Learning at the core of their education programs. But as with many other educational innovations, CBL practice (at TU/e and worldwide) has outrun theory. Therefore, in this project that has been shortlisted for EAPRIL’s Best Practice-Based Research Award, a team of teachers and researchers at TU/e have joined forces and chosen a three-step approach to strengthen the conceptual basis of CBL and explore the practical use and added value of CBL.

First, we captured the vast variety of existing CBL implementations on campus and determined dimensions and design criteria of CBL courses influencing student learning processes and learning outcomes across different disciplines, such as critical thinking, creativity, multidisciplinary knowledge, and innovation.

This led to the second step: the development of a heuristic framework for capturing the conditions, process, and outcomes of student learning in CBL, paying specific attention to the distinct levels and content of the context in which CBL takes place.

In step 3, we redesigned courses to CBL. The re-design was accompanied by both qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative research captured teacher collaboration and adaptation to changing teacher roles in CBL. Longitudinal quantitative research was conducted to compare students’ learning processes and outcomes in the original and the redesigned courses. Results informed both theory and practice and contributed to the development of support structures for (re)designing CBL courses, such as a toolkit and challenge portfolio.

Our main insight is that CBL is a highly adaptable, future-proof educational concept that may foster sustainable student learning. We are proud of the achievements of this multi-professional team and the results of our collaborative work and look forward to discussing our important insights with educational researchers and practitioners at the 2025 EAPRIL conference in Malta!

Kerstin Helker on behalf of the TU/e project team

(Do not hesitate to get in touch: k.helker@tue.nl)