Reflection on Case-Based Learning

Wang (2003) describes Case-Based Learning as “a means for collecting, indexing, accessing, and analyzing cases.”

According to the Queen’s University Centre for Teaching and Learning, the eleven rules for Case-Based Learning are:
1. Tells a story
2. Focuses on an interest-arousing issue
3. Set in the past five years
4. Creates empathy with the central characters
5. Includes quotations. There is no better way to understand a situation and to gain empathy for the characters
6. Relevant to the reader
7. Must have pedagogic utility
8. Conflict provoking
9. Decision forcing
10. Has generality
11. Is short

Case-Based Learning strikes me as being a very practical, well-thought-out technique for teaching certain courses which require higher-order thinking skills, foremost among them, problem-solving and synthesis. Synthesis requires that the learner take an idea and mold it to fit his situation. There are no “right or wrong” answers in this approach…just plenty of divergent thinking with the goal of producing multiple responses that would adequately fit the situations for which they are intended. Once again, learning is student-centered and there is plenty of room for collaboration, and situations are relevant as well as authentic.

Jonassen (2002) describes stories as “the most natural and powerful formalism for storing and describing experiential knowledge that is essential to problem solving…Problems are solved by retrieving similar past experiences in the form of stories and applying the lessons learned from those stories to the new problems.” He further describes the ability of human intellect to synthesize and incorporate ideas when he states that “(t)he memory structures used for understanding the story are the same as those used to carry out the task…(g)iven the lack of previous experiences by novices, experiences available through a case library are expected to augment their repertoire of experiences by connecting with those they have experienced.”

Creation of a case library is central to this approach. Jonassen (2002) states that “(t)he process of understanding and solving new problems using case libraries has three parts:
1. Recalling old experiences
2. Interpreting the new situation in terms of the old experience based on the lessons that we learned from the old experience
3. Adapting the old solution to meet the needs of the new situation



This approach simply makes too much sense. All of us, when faced with a difficult situation, have asked people whose opinions we trust how they dealt with that particular situation. More often than not, those people are glad to tell us their stories so that we may synthesize their previously acquired wisdom to fit our situation. This is education in its most natural form, and teachers and instructional designers should be encouraged to use it generously.

There are a couple of difficulties, however, with this approach. As usual, the time required to create CBL is prohibitive, unless it will be used with repetition. Mass production by an educational firm once again is the cure for that ill. There is also the problem of finding authoritative persons who will be willing to give of their time and efforts to relate their own experiences on a wholesale basis.

I would not hesitate to use this theory because of the philosophical basis upon which the theory is designed. Authenticity, well-adapted to multimedia making it accessible to any student at any time, students have the ability to draw upon the intellectual capital of others and synthesize it for their own purposes, the list goes on and on.

Educational modules can easily be presented via internet using video broadcast media including Youtube and Ustream. Wikis, chatrooms , and collaboration sites such as Elluminate and Skype are the perfect companion to video broadcast sites. Not to mention websites presenting the good old standby, text.

Many in this class have already taken ECI 716, “Design & Evaluation of Instructional Materials.” Those who have taken this course have already been introduced to case-based learning, as videos were created for that course that describe situations that instructional designers have faced and require that students reflect upon the material and draw information for their own purposes.