PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING IN BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

Problem-based learning (PBL) is gaining popularity among several fields and subjects, but in business management remains a marginal methodology. Nevertheless, the trend in higher education is shifting from formal lecturing to guided self-education, where more emphasis is put in the process of learning, in how a problem can be approached and how to find relevant information and the relevant variables, rather than in the memorization of the conventional and basic body of knowledge of a field. The presence of PBL in a field depends on different factors, and although the championship of professors and the methodology innovation tradition of the University have been the major drivers in the last two decades, nowadays the method has become sufficiently contrasted and known to have gained a larger presence in business schools independently of the University. The lack of this presence must be attributed to other factors, intrinsic to the management field. The objective of this paper is to analyze the characteristics of business management than can hinder the process of learning through PBL and how these difficulties could be overcome. The study is based on a pilot project for the use of PBL in the tourism degree, involving two subjects (strategic management and operations management), in the Universitat Jaume I (Spain). The findings show that subjects dealing with ambiguous open problems, like strategic management, where there is not a prevalent paradigm and several approaches must be contemplated for a specific problem, the problems proposed did not obtained the expected learning results. On the contrary, for subjects dealing with concrete bounded problems with a limited number of variables and a limited set of applicable techniques, like operation management, the learning of the students can be guided. Some possible strategies are proposed to overcome or reduce the difficulties found in conceptual subjects.