As I cycled past the School of Business and Economics this morning, I snuck a glance through the windows. In a flash, I saw them, sitting in a typical square: students in the first tutorials of the day. In the late nineties, when I was studying Arts and Social Sciences with a modest number of fellow students, you could occasionally switch groups. Nobody wanted to be in the tutorials at half past eight on a Monday or Tuesday morning, or at three thirty on Fridays, because then you wouldn’t catch a train home until late. They weren’t strict about switching, what did it matter to them whether it was Jenny or Bob who showed up. There was a chance the new face would be forced to take the minutes (not exactly anyone’s ‘favourite’ pastime). At the time, the seven steps – the basis for all problem-based learning – were still very strictly adhered to. When we started in first year, we were even given an instruction manual explaining those seven steps. It was in my parents’ attic for years, shoved between stacks of summaries and course readers.
Last week, colleague Deborah Blekkenhorst and former editor Wammes Bos recorded a podcast about problem-based learning, as part of 50 years of UM. Their guest was PBL celebrity Henk Schmidt, who started at the medical faculty of the State University of Limburg in 1974, and Oscar van den Wijngaard from EDLAB. In an old interview with Schmidt in Observant, when he had already moved from Maastricht University to Erasmus University, he said that he had been tasked with setting up a new psychology programme using the classical form of PBL. An amazing opportunity, he felt. At the time, he said that Maastricht was showing “signs of fossilisation”. The teaching was often done by senior staff members, “researchers who had grown bored of PBL after a few years. So what did I do in Rotterdam? I chose to have limited senior academic staff, combined with young psychology graduates who were focused solely on teaching. But for no more than two days a week and no longer than three years.” In a bid to keep PBL fresh.
My cohort of Arts and Social Science students also had an enthusiastic academic team, young and old. Professors regularly joined tutorials as tutors, they took their time and added their expertise whenever the discussion ground to a standstill. Over the last few years, we have heard that tutorials don’t always work very well. Sometimes there’s more silence than discussion (participants are quiet or unmotivated) or tutors don’t know anything (either they’re still a student or they’re an expert in a different field). Silence is not a new phenomenon. In 1997, discussions were also sometimes impossible to keep going.
It took an hour and a half to record the podcast. It’s up to Deborah to cut it down by about half. A lot of work, because – irony of ironies – there were no such silences in the podcast studio.
The editor-in-chief gives a look behind the scenes at the editorial office