Paper Title
The Challenges of The PBL Model At CEIPA Business School in Colombia

Abstract
The marketplace for business schools has become very competitive due to increase student mobility and global technology, which poses a challenge for universities worldwide to update their teaching-learning methodology and approach, to keep attracting students. Students also are changing and demand a more application-oriented learning and teaching methods to use it immediately in their line of work. Among those methods, the Problem-based Learning (PBL) has gained relevancy due to the positive results with students who have a more pragmatic approach to real-life problems. CEIPA Business School has more than 40 years refining their own approach to PBL using “problemic nuclei”, that allows student to use the problems as a vehicle for learning a particular area of business with a high degree of applicability, since the problems and cases come from real companies in the Medellin, Colombia region. Their methodology has changed throughout the years, but the key principle remains the same: students need to learn from real business problems, and not only theory in the classroom. Other related methodologies have developed in the last few years, including competency-based learning (CBL) as well as Precision Learning, that narrow down the scope of the student’s ability to integrate his/her learning based on their own abilities and competencies, as well as academic and experiential background. This paper reviews current literature about PBL and compares it with the CEIPA model, in an effort to discover some elements or ideas to incorporate to the “problemic nuclei” method. This is a preliminary paper and further research is necessary to have a complete discussion of many PBL models used in other universities. Key words- Problem-based learning.