Course Level PBL:An Excellent Teaching Method for Increasing Skill Levels and Learning Motivation in First Year of Engineering Students

The recent survey done by various agencies on employability of engineering students indicates that an Indian graduate engineers lacks crucial employability skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, team work and communication. Problem and Project based learning can be the best alternative to solve the employability issues of an Indian engineering graduate. In first year of engineering failure percentage, drop out and learning problems are generally high. Success of engineering profession largely depends on the knowledge gained and skills acquired by student during four years of engineering graduate programme. In this paper, to improve skills and learning motivation of students, an attempt is made to implement course level PBL model for one of the important technical course of first year as Basic Mechanical Engineering. The outcomes to be assessed were problem solving ability, team work and communication. Course Basic Mechanical Engineering was designed and developed to learn it in PBL environment. Course PBL assessment and evaluation strategies were communicated with students before starting the course. Implementation was carefully done for entire academic semester of the course and observations were noted. Implementation results were found very promising and satisfactory. Students were found extremely happy in learning PBL environment. They also stated that course level PBL was very much helpful for them to improve critical skills such as problem solving ability, team work, communication and self directed learning.