Journal Press India^®

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Case-based learning is one of the popular active, student-centered teaching-learning strategies and has become the answer for growing criticism and awareness of the huge gap between theory and practice in all sorts of educational settings. It is a pedagogy that intends to move a step ahead of just implanting information in students’ minds thereby reversing the contemporary education approach to learning by swapping the role of teachers and learners. CBL as a student-centered pedagogy demands students’ active involvement in the teaching-learning process and forces the learners to engage in self-directed learning. Scholars argue that many studies have been carried out to evaluate small-group CBL but there is paucity of researches that studied the benefits of CBL involving larger group of learners. Thus, this study aimed at understanding the impact of CBL on students’ learning, from the students’ perspective, amongst the RUB Colleges. Thus, based on thorough literature review, a survey questionnaire was developed. The data was categorized using factor analysis based on the data from six RUB colleges. An analysis of data gathered from 134 respondents consisting of 74 male and 60 female from 6 different colleges under RUB colleges, viz; GCBS, JNEC, CLCS, Sherubtse, CNR and PCE showed that students have a positive experience of leanring under CBL method as opposed to traditional lecturing method. Very specifically, students associated CBL with self-regulated learning which compels students to undertake more independent learning through exploration of various learning platforms and materials. Further, results show that CBL helps the students in developing soft skills like presentation skills, confidence, critical thinking and life skills. Given the inherent nature of CBL that focusses on the learners, results indicated that learners experience a greater sense of participation in the learning process along with better understanding of the concepts. Additionally, it was also established that CBL helps the students with better ability to interconnect and integrate different concepts, even across modules. However, RUB colleges seem to be relying more of foreign cases for the purpose of using CBL. Thus, though the study strongly suggests continuing to adopt CBL as the primary teaching- learning pedagogy, it also recommends using more Bhutanese born cases for the ease of understanding of the learners and also for greater ability to relate to the ground realities.

Keywords

CBL, Teaching-learning process, Learning

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