Strategies to improve collaboration in a problem-based learning environment : Alien Rescue

There is an ever growing need to research and develop pedagogical strategies that cater to the 21st-century skills. Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is one such instructional strategy. There are currently many PBL environments, but for this report, I use a PBL environment called ‘Alien Rescue’ as an example. PBL has many goals that it wishes to achieve. In this report, I highlight the importance of five such goals. I then review the practices in Alien Rescue to see which goals it supports the best and which goal could need improvements. I then choose to focus on one of the very important goals, namely, collaboration. I again review the literature to find strategies that support collaborative learning in PBL. Finally, I contextualize these strategies to Alien Rescue. I make specific suggestions that will improve collaboration, offer implementation tactics for these suggestions, and also give ways to evaluate the effectiveness of the suggestions in Alien Rescue. I hope to help in the research and development process of Alien Rescue with this report.