Problem-based Educational Environments: A Case Study in e-Commerce and Business Planning

Abstract

Introduction. The purpose of the present study was to explore the educational and cognitive aspects of an innovative approach to Internet use within an interdisciplinary, integrated framework for activities set up to enable students to acquire knowledge informally. These activities had the potential to provide real-world results through a model that was easily applicable in current educational practice.Method. Adopting a constructivist, “learning by doing” approach, a network of five European secondary schools and educational and technological research institutes developed a web-enabled application for teaching various topics related to the e-commerce of agricultural products (AGROweb). This generated a business microcosm in the different schools, allowing students to have contacts with producers, win orders via the Internet and deal with payment and shipping issues. This marketplace was supplemented with a flexible virtual environment where students and teachers could continuously discuss and exchange ideas, and familiarize themselves with the new interactive tools.Results. The AGROweb project forced students to tackle the problems of the real business world (i.e., establishing contacts with producers, winning orders via the Internet, handling shipping-related issues and payment requirements). For the students, working on the project gave them a desire to broaden their knowledge of computing at various levels, namely web design, animation, software development, databases, and so on. During the project, teaching and learning were no longer perceived of as opposites, but instead as complementary activities.Conclusion. Technology-based learning environments like AGROweb provide opportunities for acquiring both declarative and procedural knowledge. Similarly, their multidisiplinarity helps learners to develop general strategies and to transfer these strategies from one specific context to another. However, a very careful assessment is needed whenever changes and new learning strategies are involved, in order to measure the impact of these changes from a psychological and educational point of view and define the formal directions to follow.