In the online environment, students are assigned their own private asynchronous conference for discussions. Groups of students may also use synchronous chat if all students in the group can meet virtually at the same time. At Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada , a PBL exercise works like this. The group is assigned a problem to read. The problems contain information, some of which is important, and some is not.
Students brainstorm about the problem and form a hypothesis about the cause of the problem.
They examine the problem for facts that support their hypothesis. They also determine what additional information they need to solve it. Then students in the group decide how to find that information. Some information is central to the problem and everyone is responsible for looking it up. Other information may be important and individual students take the responsibililty for researching those issues.