The limits of experiential learning

 

The limits of experiential learning 

 

Guilty as charged, we evangelised experiential learning as the most appropriate education format to meet the demands of rapidly changing workplaces.  

Dismayed by over-reliance on uninteresting lectures with hundreds of slides, we emphasised practical engagement. Our point was that the solitary content consumption, whether from books or from videos, does not allow anyone to prepare for rapid shifts in technology or workplace practices. Instead, the learners need to work with other people, as most work today is done in teams, and they should solve real-life problems, as only by application are things really learnt. 

But there must be more than this if one is to create a learning experience in the twenty-first century. That application is a better way of learning than reading textbooks is rather well known. No one denies that experiential learning works better in preparing for practical work. Rather, it is the limits of experiential learning, practical challenges of building effective models of it in a school setting, that lead to its limited use in academic setting. To make it popular, one must consider these limitations and find ways to make it effective. 

Three challenges 

The first of these challenges is that experience is chaotic. The unpredictability of real-life makes it difficult, if not impossible, to pre-define learning outcomes, which colleges are expected to do. One way to deal with it is to treat experience as time served, as in internships, which is treated for its intrinsic value rather than for explicit learning outcomes. In most schools, this is a semi-academic activity, run by specialist teams dealing with employer engagement, and they usually track the learners’ development in terms of behavioural change, rather than looking to frame the outcomes within the curricular objectives. Therefore, a student at a co-op university may be studying for a degree in Data Science, but she can meet her co-op requirements through any professional job, for example, working in an accounting firm. Most academic programmes today acknowledge the value of exposure to the chaos of real-life, but maintain that these should remain distinct – the structured classroom and the chaotic world of work.  

The second challenge is that all experiences are unique and difficult to generalise from. Who can tell if one has a good experience or bad one? Apart from some outliers – a chance trip to Paris thrown in with the internship or ending up with a psychopath as a boss – most experiences are so unique that they could be impossible to benchmark. As for learning, other than some ‘never again’ moments, it may be hard to clarify what one really learnt. To make things more complex, whether we can apply what we learnt, depends on our ability to reflect and change ourselves – not something that can be easily captured in a GPA. Instead, the quest to make the outcome of experiential learning explicit may end up in the learners becoming hostages to their experience, drawing conclusions from what has been observed and indulging in stereotypes. 

Finally, experiential learning is costly. It is expensive for employers to manage, as the students need more support and often have less commitment than a full-time employee. If a college has to do a good job, it is more expensive for them to support the students through the work experience, as this has to be tailored to individual students. It is also costly for the students, particularly in terms of commute and accommodation, if one has to go somewhere else for the experience. 

These challenges make experiential learning a nice-to-have thing, particularly for colleges suffering from a lack of resources. The students are left on their own devices to find co-op opportunities, largely unsupported, to be shaped by the employers as they please. In the UK, the joke is that internships are primarily about making coffee.  

Framework as solution 

To embed experiential learning in curricula and make co-ops meaningful, we created a framework to attain tangibility, transparency and manageability.  

The framework is meant to organise real-life problems as projects, with objectives and timelines as tangibly as possible. This is not to disregard the chaos but to deal with it in a common-sense way. The unexpected twists-and-turns of real-life create learning moments within this framework. Within the framework, the college, the intended beneficiaries (employers or a different kind of customer) and the learner all agree on certain tangible outcomes within a timeline, but not necessarily the path towards it. This last bit is a key difference from what happens in the school: It is important to guard against being prescriptive about how things need to be done in order not to distort reality. In this way, the framework transformed real-life to structured chaos, in which derailments are inevitable and are to be expected, and yet they are recognised as derailments and dealt with in real-time. 

Further, our framework focuses on making the journey transparent to deal with the challenge that every experience is unique. This way, the learner is challenged to draw out general principles from specific experiences. Besides, each learner’s observation and learning are to be moderated as a group, with the comparison of perspectives and negotiations about how to cope with emergent challenges. This transparency, radical in any college setting, guarantees that learning is not just personal but also social.  

Finally, we created the framework coopting the popular Agile methodology and made self-organising teams, rather than individual learners directed by their tutors, the key unit of analysis and observation. True empowerment, which is rare in a classroom and yet common in all learner-directed activities (think of student union activities), is the goal here. This is also the way to reduce the management overheads for the college and the employers, to make experiential learning more affordable and achievable. An empowered set of people can achieve great things remotely – or, getting things done without the overheads of travel can only be achieved by a truly empowered set of people.  

Towards true understanding

The worse thing than having no experiential learning opportunity is having a bad one. Lately, speaking about experiential learning and cooperative higher education has become fashionable and the field is replete with half-baked schemes. The idea that experiential learning just happens if someone is in a work-like situation is common, but completely misguided. Learning is a deliberate act and make-believe work (or work-simulation) does not guarantee learning. The science of experiential learning is complex, and lazy solutions do more harm than good. 

Having developed the framework to make experiential learning tangible, transparent and manageable, we are refining our practice further. One necessary step in the process of making this learning purposeful and embed it in practice is to enable effective reflection, which can be achieved only by helping another person. For us, experiential learning is not just about having the experience, but also sharing it. Because only through sharing, one truly understands.