Challenge based learning: the importance of world-leading companies as training partners

Since 2013, the Tecnologico de Monterrey has been implementing the Tec21 Educational Model, which promotes student participation under the challenge-based learning framework. This places students in challenging, and interactive learning experiences. One of the central proposals of the Tec21 model is the posing of challenges to the student so that he/she develops disciplinary and cross-disciplinary skills. In this paper, we report the results of four learning experiences based on challenges where students from Mechanical, Mechatronics and Sustainable Development Engineering undergraduate programs were immersed into real-life challenges of three different world-leading companies (namely Boehringer Ingelheim, Covestro and Becton–Dickinson). These challenges were designed by personnel from the companies and professors from Tecnologico de Monterrey. Skills required in these work places, such as work collaboration, critical thinking, ethics and resilience, were compared with those developed under a school-controlled environment. Our results demonstrated that a CBL experience with an industrial partner increases complexity and uncertainty levels. Consequently, the development of skills is consistently higher compared to learning delivered via traditional methods. In our experimental set up, the learning modules were designed to achieve the goals of both the company and the school. The challenges brought forth issues such as ethical dilemmas, valorization, design planning, scientific methodology and recycling options of solid waste products. We analyzed the resilience of the students to failure, their solutions to the challenges and the knowledge acquisition from the contents of every single learning module. The main difference between having a school-controlled challenge and a highly undefined challenge developed at an industrial plant is the level of uncertainty about solving the problem(s). A lot of factors were evident in our study; for example, cross-disciplinary skills, such as teamwork (collaboration), critical thinking, ethics, problem-solving, planning ahead and resilience were observed. Our results demonstrated that having an industrial partner in the Challenge-Based-Learning experience is essential to increase the complexity of the challenge and the uncertainty level, and it helps dramatically in exposing students to real-life professional problems that need to be solved.