Adaptability to Problem-based Learning at Aalborg University: Experience from four first-year Chinese engineering graduate students

The current trends in engineering education require new competencies that go beyond students’ technical expertise. Among these skills, adaptability is regarded as one of the important skills as it indicates how engineering students approach changing circumstances. In general, this means to what extent engineering students are able to adjust to new learning methods and different social and academic environments. The transition into any university is generally known to create some difficulties for students. Problem-based and project-based learning (PBL) has been part of curricula over the past four decades at Aalborg University (AAU), and also here the transition process into the university can be challenging. Students usually transit into the university on two occasions, as undergraduates or as graduate. This paper focuses on the challenges encountered when adapting to PBL for international graduate students without prior knowledge and experience in PBL. In addition, these challenges are even larger for students from China due to the differences in culture, language, learning behaviours, conceptions of learning, and so on. From these perspectives, it is necessary to broaden our understanding of Chinese students’ transition from lecture-based traditional learning and adaptation into a new problem-based and collaborative learning. Therefore, as an exploratory study, this paper aims at investigating what challenges first-year graduate Chinese students experienced when entering AAU and discussing the strategies they used in the adaptation process. Four first-year master Chinese students from different engineering departments participated in the semi-structured interviews and answered open-ended questions. The result showed that Chinese students face challenges in heavy academic workload, collaboration, communication and different assessment. However, making more efforts on study, clear groupwork division, good project management, inclusive and balanced team and effective communication we anticipate that this will help Chinese students to become better at adapting the Danish PBL context at AAU.