Dear Chris,

thank you (and the others) for the comments. Spoon feeding may not be what higher
education is about. Yet, on the other extreme there would be large library and a number
of students wandering around reading whatever they find and feel useful. Traditional lecturing
goes closer to the other end, while PBL tries to be closer to the other end of the spectrum.
In my experience, it sometimes happen that the students take totally "wrong" approach
to the problem and search their learning effort to totally other direction than originally
intended. Is this really wrong, or not? If it could be considered wrong, then the tutor has
a lot of responsibility (and difficult task) in guiding the students somehow to the right
track without spoon feeding. If the tutor is new to the method (PBL) and also does not
the the subject well (teacher of history being tutor for an electronics group) he/she is
in real trouble. Sometimes this is difficult to avoid because of available resources.

Sincerely
                                                Markku Suni
                                                Turku Polytechnic
                                                Turku, Finland