PBL at the Joint Medical Program at the University of Newcastle

Today was my first day at the University of Newcastle.  I sat in on a basic science lecture for the 1st year students and then observed a 3-hour 2nd year tutorial session in the Endocrine block.  They were wrapping up a case about diabetes after a 2-week holiday.  It was really interesting for me to see yet another example of PBL that differs from what we do at UBC in Canada and different as well from PAHS in Nepal.
There are many things that make this program different from UBC's. 
1.  Students can enter straight from high school - of the 8 students in this tutorial, 6 were ~20 years old and straight from high school. 
2.  There are international students enrolled here.  One of the students in this group was from Malaysia.
3.  They only work on a case in 2 tutorial sessions - they start (or open, as they call it) on Tuesday and close on Monday.  The Monday sessions are 3 hours and the Tuesday sessions are 2 hours.
4.  There is only 1 trigger for the whole case - there is no progression through a case.
5.  There appears to be a real emphasis on the basic sciences with little reference back to the clinical case or scenario.
6.  Students read straight from their notes and teach each other a lot of the learning targets.
7.  One student is responsible for each learning target - so there is very little discussion from the others.

I will have to see if this was just tutorial-specific or if this is just such a different PBL program.  I will observe another 2nd year tutorial tomorrow morning with a different tutor.  It was a great experience and I think that we can learn a lot from each other.