Abstract

Media planning is a core subject in pursuing a communication degree that specializes in advertising. For communication studies like media planning, students are constantly encouraged to be critical in their analysis of assignments, use group work and brainstorming sessions to enhance their learning experience, make field trips to media agencies to have a first hand look at how things are run in the ‘real world’ and even go for internships to attain hands-on training. However, this list of encouragement (though not exhaustive) is rarely a necessity in existing syllabus. It was found that after two years of conventional approach in teaching media planning, the outcome was disappointing. Hence a more holistic approach in the form of Problem Based Learning (PBL), was utilised for the July 2007 intake in the School of Communication of a private higher learning institution in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. After undergoing The PBL , for one out of the three semesters the preliminary findings reveal that a portion of the students are positive towards the PBL approach and though are comfortable in the current learning didactic system, they are not resistant to changes in syllabuses that are not didactic in nature. Additionally, the attractiveness of a PBL course is said to be highly dependent on the teacher’s charisma and teaching approach.