The Centre for Educational Development (CED) aims to nurture a community of productive, constructive and flexible learners. Towards this vision, the Centre focuses on creating a stimulating and positive learning environment where students learn at their own pace and share their ideas with one another.

PBL Training Programmes

Throughout the year, the Centre organised several sessions of the five-day Professional Development in Facilitation of Problem-Based Learning Programme (Foundation) to further enhance the performance of facilitators. Topics covered included the basics and principles behind PBL, the RP-PBL process and RP’s holistic assessment. The programme attracted even external participants from institutes such as the Air Force Training School, the Naval Training Command and St. Scholastica’s College in Manila.

A two-day conference was organised on 4 & 5 November 2003 to provide a forum for sharing of practices and feedback from academic staff on the RP-PBL process since its implementation in the first semester.

Sharing of Best Practices

The Centre hosted visits from various parties, some of whom came to share their experiences in different aspects of teaching and learning. One of these was Prof Dan Pratt from the University of British Columbia who shared with RP staff various teaching perspectives.

Duncan Nulty from Griffith University also hosted a seminar at RP, sharing on the design and execution of student evaluations of teachers and subjects at the Queensland University of Technology. He also spoke about the uses and misuses of student evaluations. Our student evaluation questionnaire was eventually modelled on the advice given during the seminar.

From 16-27 March 2004, the Centre attended the annual Asia Pacific Conference on PBL hosted by the University of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. RP presented seven papers at the conference. The Director of the Centre presented papers on student assessment in PBL and the epistemological gaps in the practice of PBL. He was subsequently invited by The Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Learning and Teaching Centre, to share with a group of graduate students the PBL practices at RP. He was also invited to attend Engineering and Science classes as well as the Learning and Teaching Centre faculty development programmes at DIT to see their application of PBL.