Professors’ and Students’ Perception of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Project Based Learning

Requirements of the job market have substantially changed in the recent years while the teaching methods have remained largely the same. Employers find the graduates lacking in teamwork, communication and other soft skills as well as in engineering thinking, engineering intuition and higher order thinking and problem solving skills. Project based learning (PBL) appears to provide an alternative teaching process capable of addressing these employers’ needs. The problem arises with implementation of PBL into existing engineering curricula, which are not flexible and easily changeable. Therefore, if full scale implementation of PBL courses is difficult, most significant advantages and barriers to implementation should be sought out. Goal of the paper was to discover the most significant advantages and disadvantages of PBL from the students’ and professors’ point of view. To that end, both students and professors were questioned on their perception of PBL from their own personal experience on a complex interdisciplinary student project. Taking into account the difference in sample sizes of the two groups, the students’ opinions were collected through an online survey and the professors’ through semistructured interviews and an ABC method questionnaire. Research findings from this paper may be used to determine which aspects of PBL are most suited for engineering education and conversely, which should be focused on the most. On the other hand, it is useful to know which disadvantages and barriers to implementation are the most significant and which need to be overcome first to enable PBL implementation.