Lessons Learned and Tips

We have been applying PBL to learning by our students since 1996. Although many lessons have been learned, we are still continually learning and discovering new insights each year in our PBL process. Our desire is to find out and learn as much as we can about how students learn and how we can make the PBL process more effective for our students. We are very thankful to our students for their continuing support of our endeavors to make learning interesting, effective, and fun for them. Students continue to give us feedback and their input has shed much light on our PBL process. As a result of their feedback and honest discussion, we are continually striving to improve on our tutorial process. We must confess that our experiences with PBL were not easy ones to start with. There were times of encouragement and frustration, especially early in the course when students were facing a major change in their educational mindset, when motivation and encouragement were important. Above all, we have learned that implementing PBL is not easy! We have learned many insights during our experiences with PBL. It is our belief that some of these insights would help others to better understand the implementation of PBL. In this chapter, we share with readers some of the issues that we have learned are important to PBL implementation. For each of the issues discussed, we have also incorporated guidelines to help readers.