Shaping education for the future: reflections on the International CBL Conference

On 7 and 8 April 2025, TU Eindhoven hosted the International Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) Conference. As co-organiser, 4TU.CEE supported this first international event on CBL to listen, reflect and rethink how we approach education in the context of complex societal challenges. The two-day programme brought together educators, students, researchers, and industry partners to share and better understand how CBL can prepare students not just for the future, but to shape it. 4TU.CEE Board members were present and the conference and reflect on their takeaways.

We asked them if they would recommend the CBL conference and the answer was a resounding yes! “It was a really valuable meeting, we all are connected through the same theme but we do not come together as a community under ‘one roof‘ very often. It was nice to interact not only students and academics but also other partners in the CBL endeavours; industry, NGOs, governmental agencies.” – Esther Ventura-Medina (TU/e)

AI and education: critical questions

In her opening keynote, Inés López Arteaga (TU/e) reflected on the role of AI in education, suggesting that AI can support CBL by offering new tools and resources, while CBL in turn provides an authentic context for developing AI literacy. One participant raised concern whether universities are doing enough to guide the principles behind AI in education.

Challenge, collaboration, and dealing with uncertainty

A recurring topic across the conference was the semantics of “challenge” in challenge-based learning. What makes something a challenge? Is it a project, a problem, or something else entirely? The session Is it a challenge just because we call it one? tackled this head-on. Rather than defining challenge as a format, participants explored it as an experience that can be shaped by complexity and the perspectives of those involved.

Several sessions explored the role of collaboration across disciplines, and between students and external partners. The Art as a Catalyst session run by the Innovation Space TU/e, showed how the master course for engineering students on innovation through art and design, develops students' competences, such as radical openness, integrated knowing and explorative prototyping, focusing less on correctness and more on exploration. Working with artists and museums on open-ended challenges allows students to learn to deal with uncertainty and experience new perspectives.

As Suleman Joseph Audu of The Ocean CleanUp noted, we should involve more non-profit organisations as stakeholders. Cindy Poortman (UT), reflected: “While it is very important to involve industry, non-profit organisations can also offer complex, wicked challenges that require the out-of-the-box thinking we would like students to develop; challenges that relate very much to key issues of the near future for the current and next generation of students.” Remon Rooij (TU/D), agrees: “Industry has private interests, government has policy interests, and NGOs usually stand for a societal-facing interest!”

Student-led learning and inclusion

The focus on student-led learning in CBL surfaced throughout the conference, touching on both pedagogy and inclusion. The opening Forum and many sessions explored how giving students more ownership supports diversity and inclusion, offering space for different types of learners to contribute meaningfully to collective goals.

Charlotte Norman (Linköping University) underlined the entrepreneurial element of CBL: “CBL helps students learn in their own way and contribute in their own way. But we also need to ask, what kind of entrepreneurs are we trying to develop?”

At the same time, some participants raised concerns about the limits of ownership when the challenge is tightly framed by external partners. Judith Gulikers (WUR) reflected: “There are many definitions and operationalisations of CBL and they differ largely in the extent to which students and stakeholders are co-learners in the process... I can imagine it to be insightful to make this diversity more explicit and discuss how these different types maybe all can have a role in a learning trajectory of students.”

Challenges of challenge based learning

A strength of the conference was its openness to critique. One attendee noted how CBL still often follows Western and STEM-based models of innovation. “If CBL promotes Western ways of thinking and profit-driven innovation, how do we make sure we also address societal and cultural challenges from other perspectives?”Workshops ranged from curriculum co-design to hands-on tools like the CBL compass, which helps educators reflect on how challenge-based a course really is. Gerald Jonkers (RUG) described a workshop on stakeholder alignment: “Due to the wide scope of all intentions and requirements of the (seven) stakeholders, we struggled to find the right (learning) objective of the project, which implies that the educational purpose remained vague.” It is a reminder that CBL design needs clarity, not to simplify learning, but to keep its focus on meaningful development.

Recognising student contribution

At this year’s CBL conference the poster session was an excellent opportunity for the presenters to connect and get feedback from peers in the field, each presenter had 90 seconds to pitch their poster in a plenary session, before engaging in deeper discussions during the poster sessions.

The winner of the Best Poster Award, decided by public vote, was Laura Milena Escobar Medina, a Master’s student at the Technical University of Munich. Her work, Strategies and Hurdles Used When Defining and Analyzing Complex Challenges in CBL – An Observational Study, was appreciated for its clarity, relevance and direct application to practice. A follow-up webinar organised by 4TU.CEE is planned to hear more about Laura’s findings and continue the conversation beyond the conference.

Space to connect

With more than 250 attendees, a quarter of them coming from abroad, the conference was diverse and accessible. The programme combined structured sessions with ample time for informal conversations, something attendees appreciated!

“I very much liked the focus of the conference: you can talk to practically anybody as everybody is ‘into CBL’. This creates such a nice, inspiring and opportunity-seeking atmosphere. Moreover, I felt it to be a great added value to have so many international perspectives involved! I was so surprised to see so many CBL initiatives in countries I was totally unaware of.” – Judith Gulikers (WUR)

The CBL conference went further than showcasing best practices and familiarising colleagues with developments. It was about making space for critical reflection. The event created room to ask real questions and to accept that the answers will evolve.

“CBL is a means, not a goal. It’s a messy, iterative process of value creation.”

This insight from PhD researcher Victor Garcia Galofre can be applied not just to students’ learning (and teachers' teaching), but to how we collectively shape the future of education.