Extended abstract
Gaining more and more popularity, challenge-based learning (CBL) is a teaching approach that uses co-creation between an array of academic and external stakeholders to enable self-directed learning for students. CBL usually involves students from different disciplines working together in teams to address real-world challenges in an open-ended fashion, thereby promoting interdisciplinarity and innovation (Gallagher & Savage, 2020; Höffken & Lazendic-Galloway, 2024; Malmqvist et al., 2015). CBL fosters collaboration among disparate stakeholders from diverse fields such as academia, government, NGOs, and industry to provide a rich educational experience for students, allowing them to gain theoretical knowledge and real-life insights through autonomous experiential learning (Brundiers et al., 2010; Mori Junior et al., 2019; Sulkowski et al., 2020). This collaboration between students, academics and external actors has been identified as a key competency in CBL (Diaz Martinez, 2019; Membrillo-Hernández et al., 2019; Santos et al., 2015), providing the approach with unique strengths such as deepening student knowledge (Serrano et al., 2018), motivating and engaging students (Morales-Mendez et al., 2019), and providing students with industry specific training (Mora-Salinas et al., 2019). The advantages CBL provides has resulted in technical universities in the Netherlands and beyond committing to including the approach in a greater percentage of the courses offered, with these offerings expanding at an accelerating rate (Pepin & Vonk, 2022). This, however, presents new challenges, with many best practices struggling to scale from being offered to smaller numbers of students to larger numbers of students. Notable among these is the necessity to align the disparate stakeholders involved in a CBL project at scale. And while much excellent research into CBL has been undertaken recently, it has frequently focused on interactions with students (Gallagher & Savage, 2020; Leijon et al., 2021; Martin & Bombaerts, 2022), with little attention paid to systemic considerations for implementing CBL. This research project seeks to address this, focusing on bringing a systems perspective to the challenge of aligning the expectations held by stakeholders involved in a CBL project by answering the question why and how are expectations aligned among ecosystem stakeholders during a challenge-based learning project at TU/e? To provide a systems perspective, this research project employed the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann (Luhmann, 1978, 1997, 2020). Luhmann saw systems as being autonomous and independent, with each system being operationally closed and having its own logic (Luhmann, 1995; Seidl & Becker, 2006). Luhmann thought of organizations as a type of social system – with each operating as a decision-making machine and having its own aim (Cooren & Seidl, 2019; Luhmann, 2018). But these organizations’ aims are not going to be the same, so in order for them to coordinate they need a shared goal that they can decide on and work towards together. It is imperative that each system reaches its own decision, as on Luhmann’s view these systems are totally independent of one another. Pretorius et al. (2024) point out that for these different actors and organizations to coordinate, they need to establish shared expectations of one another – as without these expectations, shared decisions cannot be reached (Luhmann, 2002, 2005). Therefore, the project investigated the alignment of expectations among stakeholders involved in a CBL project. To that end, this research project examined three separate examples of CBL being implemented in courses at TU/e – two at undergraduate level and one at master’s level – taking each as a case study. In each, semi structured interviews were conducted with the responsible teacher(s), multiple challenge owners, the business collaborator and partnership managers that managed the initial engagements with the challenge owners, and several of the students that participated in these courses. These interviews sought to understand how expectations were established and managed throughout the CBL process, focusing on alignment and any situations where misalignment may have occurred between stakeholders. In this regard, data collection was aimed at more accurately and easily recallable significant events (Chell & Oakey, 2004), so that events could be recounted by at least two informants or data sources to ensure potential biases or lapses in memory could be offset (Golden, 1992; Huber & Power, 1985). In addition to the semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, observational and archival data were collected to allow for triangulation across multiple sources (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2013). These data were analyzed, allowing for the construction of a narrative (Eisenhardt, 1989; Langley, 2007) that could be understood as each CBL project progressed over time. The narrative was considered from the perspective of systems thinking (Sterman, 2000), resulting in the production of a causal loop diagram (CLD) that describes the process of expectation alignment at work. The CLD comprises of three input points, one reinforcing loop and five balancing loops that together detail how responsible teachers, students, challenge owners, and business collaborator and partnership managers align their expectations with one another. In this CLD, responsible teachers and challenge owners connect with all of the other stakeholders, while students and business collaborator and partnership managers interact with responsible teachers and challenge owners, but not one another. We learn from the CLD that alignment of expectations among stakeholders is a process that must be actively managed, as there is always the risk that well-intentioned ambition can cause expectations to rise well beyond that which can be achieved. While expectations must be tempered, it’s also the case that ambition must be allowed to drive the process, as without this input the creative spark that allows for innovation might be doused. The CLD shows that the risk for snowballing expectations of a CBL project arises when actors with uninhibited ambition engage exclusively with one another. The greatest risk of this is found in the interaction between excited students and ambitious challenge owners who, with the best intentions, may drive the project’s goals to heights too lofty to be attainable, thereby resulting in a project that cannot succeed.
