Problem based learning (PBL) is usually associated with intense small-group face-to-face teaching. Flexible delivery, on the other hand, invokes images of isolated students staring at computer terminals. This paper explores ways in which flexibility may be exploited while retaining the educational advantages of problem based pedagogies. I begin with a short description of how I typically use PBL in teaching cultural anthropology and the flexibilities that are inherent to the method. I then consider how distributed learning may be catered for within such a format, taking into account the problems that each adjustment to flexibility is likely to bring with it.

PBL and cultural anthropology

I've been using PBL in one of my courses for a couple of years now and last year at this conference I reported briefly on some innovations that I was introducing. Here I will concentrate on the most prototypical PBL format that I use, since is the one most likely to be in general use, and it is the one which I am currently involved in introducing to the new Bachelor of Social Science.

Many of you will be familiar with the medical-school model of PBL in which students are presented with a situation which mimics those they are likely to meet with in practice, most commonly that of a patient presenting with some symptoms. The student must then investigate likely causes of the symptoms and come up with a diagnosis. In cultural anthropology there is no such striving for a correct answer. There are concepts and some basic facts to be learned and applied, but the whole process is much more discursive. Figure 1 illustrates one kind of trigger that I use. It is a story about a birth and subsequent celebrations which introduces a number of issues surrounding kinship and social organisation in an Aboriginal community. In groups of about ten, students work through the trigger identifying first what information is provided, then formulating hypotheses to account for their observations, then deciding what they need to find out to confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses. They then share out the learning issues thus identified and go away and do the research. In the next session they share the knowledge they have gathered, first within their own small group and then between all of the small groups in the course.

The educational advantages of the PBL method are that it helps students understand and retain more knowledge. It does this essentially through improving the information-processing accompanying learning. First, it allows students to use knowledge they have already to make sense of new information. In my illustration this existing knowledge includes "common sense" understandings of social process as well as technical aspects of anthropology. Secondly, it "encodes specificity" to use the jargon. This means it aims to enhance recall by letting learning take place in a context as near as possible to the one in which it will be applied. The medical student is presented with at least a description of a patient, the anthropologist with a representation of a social event, some details of which will not be relevant to their analytic concerns. Finally, understanding is enhanced by allowing opportunities for elaboration through discussion, teaching peers, criticising and answering questions (Albanese and Mitchell 1993:54). The small group work in classic PBL is done with a tutor/facilitator in attendance and lectures are given as the need arises only.

The inherent flexibility of PBL

The idea behind the proposition that lectures are delivered only as and when they are needed is that, in this way, lecturers can respond to issues that arise from the students' exploration of the topic. The information offered can be related to what students have already found out and learned in the context of what students can perceive as related issues. In practice it is rarely possible to be as flexible in this way as one would like sometimes for rather mundane reasons. The timetabling of suitable rooms may seem to be a minor point but goes to the heart of what I perceive to be major difficulties over flexible delivery - the inflexibility of the infrastructure. In the week when students are doing the first part of a package they need to be accommodated in many small rooms. If the trigger is a video multiple copies need to be provided. The second half of each package needs to be done partly in small group and partly in larger ones, with the ability to call the whole group together for a lecture as needed. In practice I have been able to get around these restrictions with groups of up to 35, but it will become more difficult for groups of 150 or 200, as is expected in the B.Soc.Sci intake.

There is a great deal of literature on whether or not the tutors employed in PBL subjects need to be experts in the topic at issue or not (Albanese and Mitchell 1993; Moust and Schmidt 1995; Schmidt et al 1995; Silver and Wilkerson 1991 inter alia). While experts are of course a valuable resource and can provide useful frameworks for students they tend to lecture rather than facilitate, and so interfere with the self-directed learning process. I have run a PBL course without any tutors besides myself and found this very successful. The students reported satisfaction with the freedom this gave them but the class was all advanced students who were very strongly committed to the group-based work and the topics. In addition I benefited from the presence on the course of a number of students, most of them mature age, with experience in the subject area. Nevertheless, the possibility of using student-led groups in some circumstances is another aspect of PBL which fits with demands for flexibility of delivery.

But one of the most significant ways in which PBL provides flexibility is in the scope for students to define the "problem", in a subject like cultural anthropology, in line with their own interests and objectives. In the subject I showed you a sample from earlier the packages add up to a partial ethnography of a fictional North Queensland Aboriginal community. The final assessment was an essay in which students could choose either to address theoretical issues arising from the ethnography or attempt a more applied project report addressing issues such as community development or land claims. Students were able to use this as an opportunity to explore issues only hinted at in the packages, if they hadn't already done so in working through the packages. Students with a great variety of interests can thus be accommodated within a single subject without having to create extra materials or impede other students' exploration of their interests.

Distributed learning

Although I characterised flexible delivery earlier as a matter of isolated students staring at computer screens, this is, of course a gross misrepresentation. I think it is fair to say, however, that the exact nature of flexible delivery is opaque to many of my colleagues. I would like to suggest here that we can define flexible delivery best for ourselves by keeping in mind our educational objectives, and only then considering how these might be achieved with students who are off-campus or who may confront us in such large numbers that existing methods break down. It is a matter then of distributing learning in time and space.

I have said that the advantages of PBL lie in its ability to teach students how to learn for themselves and apply that knowledge in near-to-real-life situations, and that this knowledge is retained better. The question is how distributed the PBL method can become and retain these advantages. I have no case studies to offer you, just a few suggestions a broad outline of how I expect to develop my teaching in this direction.

First, it seems obvious that printed PBL packages could easily be used in distance-education mode as long as a competent facilitator (not a subject expert) was available. This would be a mere geographical extension of the situation where a PBL subject will be run simultaneously at St Lucia and at Ipswich. A librarian, teacher or community program officer may be a suitable person to act as facilitator in remote locations. People in rural and remote communities often complain that they can only get training and education opportunities by leaving home and this method could go some way to addressing this problem. However, the students would need to have access to research facilities such as libraries, Internet and so on. Occasional lectures and links with students in other centres undergoing the same course would be possible if broadcast or video link technologies were available.

Even greater distribution might be possible through the use of computer technology to constitute "virtual" instead of actual co-present groups. For instance, instead of getting small groups together to discuss and analyse the triggers and assign learning issues, the material could be delivered electronically and the small groups constituted through bulletin board or chat room software. Students would miss out on the face-to-face interaction but would still be able to elaborate their knowledge through discussion and asking questions, but have more choice about where and when to do it. Perhaps the most elaborate version of such computer-based PBL is offered by Lotus in a variant of their Notes program called Learning Space. Figure 2 (Lotus Development Corporation 1997) is an illustration drawn from their promotional material suggesting how this might be organised. As well as the obvious elements such as course information and chat room, the package contains a section where students and staff can construct profiles of themselves to give fellow participants some idea of the other individuals on the course, their backgrounds and objectives. There is also a suite of assessment tools built into the program.

Milter and Stinson (1995), reporting on their use of an earlier version of this software in a PBL MBA course, note that the software improves team efficiency. Although getting to know fellow students electronically is a problem for most people initially they report (Milter and Stinson 1995:4) that after training and experience most of their students found the process preferable since it allows the reticent time to formulate a considered answer and peer pressure helps eliminate the noise generated by the over-talkative. In terms of their educational goals and the advantages of PBL methods, they concluded that the software not only enabled, but enhanced their program (Milter and Stinson 1995:5).

The major problem encountered by these practitioners was technological. Their server couldn't support all the various IBM clones students were using and sustaining access through modems was difficult (Milter and Stinson 1995:5). I would expect that for my students I would have even greater problems in this direction. Despite the rhetoric used by computer pushers, I'm sorry developers, at the launch of various initiatives lately in this University, my experience is NOT that all students have a computer, or having one, know how to use it as more than a typewriter. If flexibility is really about advantaging students (and not, as the more cynical suggest, getting more enrolments for fewer physical seats), this must be addressed realistically. It will not strike the mature age self-employed student as particularly flexible to be told that they are welcome to enrol in our courses as long as they have X brand hardware fitted with Y brand software and are prepared to spend $Z on technical support and regular upgrades. However, PBL course could be run in such a way as to offer students a choice between this kind of electronic group work for those who had the equipment and interest, and actual attendance with other students at pre-ordained times. With both these sets of arrangements offered, PBL could clearly be thought of as flexible delivery - and a very good example of it too.

References

Albanese M.A. and S. Mitchell' Problem-based learning: a review of literature on its outcomes and implementation issues. Academic Medicine 68:52-81.

Lotus Development Corporation, White Paper- Distributed learning: approaches, technologies and solutions.

Milter, R.G. and J.E. Stinson Using Lotus Notes to facilitate action learning, a paper presented at the 6th Annual Business/Economics Teaching Conference, Chicago, Nov10,1995.

Moust, J and H.G. Schmidt, Facilitating small-group learning: a comparison of student and staff tutors' behaviour. Instructional Science 22:287-301.

Schmidt, H., A. Arend, I. Kokx and L. Boon, Peer versus staff tutoring in problem-based learning. Instructional Science 22:279-285.

Silver, M.D. and L. Wilkerson, Effects of tutors with subject expertise on the problem-based tutorial process. Academic Medicine 66:298-300.

Figure 1

It is late one Sunday night and the Bridge family are returning to the town of Murriville from a visit to their outstation, Rivermouth, a hundred kilometres away. They had not planned to come back yet and don't like travelling over the rough track in the dark, but Katie Rivermouth is in labour in the back of the truck. Only twenty kilometres from camp they have to pull over because the baby is coming. Katie is helped out of the truck by a cousin, a sister and two aunties, who spread blankets for her under a tree overhanging a dry creek bed. Katie's husband Mick Waapur and Joe Bridge, the driver of the truck, go far enough away that they can't see or hear what's happening. Joe is Katie's mukka and husband to her Aunty Elsie Rivermouth. He grumbles "That's great. Thanks very much Katie!" Katie is by now crying out loudly "Oh piinya Elsie, oh Mum Nancy, help me." The older women calm her down and settle her with her back to the tree. In under an hour a little boy is born and the family are jubilant.