The Bologna declaration states that, “successful learning and studying in higher education should involve students in deep learning”. However, a survey of faculty across institutes in Nepal and Bhutan highlights that the undergraduate students in engineering and management lack skills needed to be industry-ready.
They face difficulty in getting employed after graduation and if placed, then struggle during their employment due to insufficient practical experience, lack of good communication skills and unawareness of larger socio-economic contexts. The Erasmus+ funded project, “Strengthening Problem-based learning in South Asian Universities”(PBL South Asia) is an endeavour to address these pressing concerns in education quality, employability and overall sustainable development of the region and to imbibe deep learning capabilities. Therefore, as an empirical study to clarify and in turn, inculcate PBL in South Asian undergraduate education, the young faculty of the inexperienced institutes from Nepal and Bhutan, alongside the students from the experienced institutes from India and Europe, were mentored by faculty and researchers from the latter to undertake multidisciplinary case studies.
The strategy of ‘Design Thinking’ was employed to methodologically guide the cases and keep it consistently problem-based, i.e., the learning is driven by the
problem with no one correct solution. Results showed that the participants reflected improvement in problem-solving skills and increased motivation, apart from enhanced collaboration and improved communication ability. Based on these findings, further development of curricula to imbibe PBL in its existing courses and guidelines to train the trainers for implementation of the same, is currently in progress.@en

The Bologna declaration states that, “successful learning and studying in higher education should involve students in deep learning”. However, a survey of faculty across institutes in Nepal and Bhutan highlights that the undergraduate students in engineering and management lack skills needed to be industry-ready. They face difficulty in getting employed after graduation and if placed, then struggle during their employment due to insufficient practical experience, lack of good communication skills and unawareness of broader socio-economic contexts. The Erasmus + funded project, “Strengthening Problem-based learning in South Asian Universities” (PBL South Asia) is an endeavour to address these pressing concerns in education quality, employability and overall sustainable development of the region and to imbibe deep learning capabilities. Therefore, as an empirical study to clarify and in turn, inculcate PBL in South Asian undergraduate education, the young faculty of the inexperienced institutes from Nepal and Bhutan, alongside the students from the experienced institutes from India and Europe, were mentored by faculty and researchers from the latter to undertake multidisciplinary case studies. The strategy of “design thinking” was employed to methodologically guide the cases and keep it consistently problem-based, i.e. the learning is driven by the problem with no one correct solution. Results showed that the participants reflected improvement in problem-solving skills and increased motivation, apart from enhanced collaboration and improved communication ability. Based on these findings, further development of curricula to imbibe PBL in its existing courses and guidelines to train the trainers for implementation of the same, are currently in progress.

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Problem-based learning (PBL) has profound implications on the motivations of the student to learn and is known to help develop critical thinking, complex problem-solving, self-learning, collaboration and communication skills, thereby enabling fresh graduates to be industry-ready. However, most institutes of higher education in South Asia offering undergraduate programmes have instructional and didactic pedagogical systems. The Erasmus + project, ‘Strengthening Problem-based Learning in South Asian Universities’ (PBL South Asia) aims to build capacity of the South Asian partner institutes by collaboratively developing best practices in PBL for undergraduate education, bringing expertise and experience of peers from across Europe and India. Therefore, to gain benefits of the PBL approach, the redesign of existing courses was undertaken and the novel strategy of conducting a Design Thinking workshop to do so, was engaged. During the five-day workshop, faculties from the institutes in Nepal and Bhutan, who are most well aware of the challenges, shortcomings and strengths of their curriculum, were mentored step-by-step, by their Indian and European peers, who have more experience in delivering PBL courses. Backed by the strategy of Design Thinking, the complex problem-solving activity of course design was addressed systematically, and the five institutes proposed redesigned courses which are currently in the process of implementation.

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