Following the ENGINITE kick-off meeting held in Limassol, Cyprus, the second coordination meeting of ENGINITE took place in London, UK in March, followed by a training event on Problem-based Learning (PBL) pedagogy. The coordination meeting and training event were held from Monday the 12th to Thursday the 15th of March 2018, at ThinkUP’s premises in London; one of the project partners in the ENGINITE consortium. In total, one full day was devoted to project coordination and planning. The next three days were fully allocated to the PBL training.
The first day of the meeting, started with the coordinator of ENGINITE, Dr Andri Ioannou, presenting the key milestones achieved in the project implementation to date. All partners discussed the next steps. Inorder to successfully develop the ENGINITE innovative training programme, each partner is responsible to develop and deliver eight courses based on the PBL approach.
The following 3 days were devoted to training on PBL. During the training, all partners were introduced to the PBL approach to teaching and learning, which was delivered by the leaders of this activity — Professor Søren Willert from Aalborg Universitet, expert and consultant in PBL, and Oliver Broadbent from ThinkUP, expert and consultant in designing engineering educational programmes using PBL. Prior to the actual PBL training in London, all partners completed a series of exercises marked as the pre-training activity essentials to introducing all partners to this pedagogical approach. The PBL training was essential in the participants’ understanding of how to build their PBL courses and how to successfully deliver the ENGINITE training programme.
The training event was based on a series of practical/hands on activities including: working in pairs to adjust (traditional) course syllabi into PBL-driven, guided interviewing sessions to advance understanding of the PBL approach, presentations of refined PBL courses and discussion, and group discussions on the challenges faced during PBL implementation and ways to overcome them. The consortium members are now working for the full development of the eight PBL courses of ENGINITE. Partners are required to train each-other on how to deliver each PBL course at the ‘train the trainers’ event to be held in June 2018, at the premises of the Technical University of Crete.