Components of Experiential Learning Courses

According to the course design triangle model, every academic course design consists of three major components aligned with each other, as listed below.

When designing an experiential learning course, these three components are rudimentary. Since experiential learning is a holistic philosophy of education based on the notion that an individual’s life experiences, education and work play a central role in their learning and understanding of new knowledge (Fry, Ketteridge & Marshall, 2009; Kolb & Kolb, 2009), positioning learning in a carefully chosen authentic experience and reinforcing it through critical reflection are essential for an experiential course design.

Fig. 1 - Components for Experiential Learning Courses:

Stages of Experiential Learning Course Design

Stage 1 - Setting learning objectives: Articulate the course goals/learning objectives to students explicitly and precisely, which enables them to know the desired outcomes and what they are expected to do in order to reach those goals.

Stage 2 - Selecting an authentic experience: An authentic experience should address a clearly-defined need or problem in a real-world setting such that students can produce practical outcomes applied to a real-life situation. Such an experience not only exposes student to learning opportunities that allow them to experience, reflect, conceptualize and experiment with new knowledge, but also equips students with the mastery of skills and competencies they need for real-world success.

The experience should not be merely a group project, field trip, in-class activity or working with external parties/organizations as they may not yield lasting and transferable learning. The chosen experience should be powerful enough to challenge students' prior knowledge/preconception and take them out of their comfort zones. A purposefully chosen experience should also embrace the conditions for critical reflection.

Stage 3 - Planning instructional activities and critical reflection: Instructional activities in experiential learning course refer to the scaffolding activities that (1) align with the selected experience, (2) promote learning by doing, (3) contain underlying content or theory, (4) be personally relevant to the student and (5) allow students to make connections between the learning they are doing and the world (Schwartz, Ryerson). Instructors are therefore encouraged to provide scaffolding for students to work through their own process of self-discovery and become self-directed learners.

Apart from the authentic experience, critical reflection plays a very important role in experiential learning. Instructors should go through the direct debriefing sessions after every instructional activity which allow students to reflect on their own learning, bringing “the theory to life” and gaining insight into their interactions with the world.

Stage 4 - Preparing assessment tasks with feedback: As learning is a process, not a product, students’ performance should not only be assessed by the product, but also the process. The assessment tasks should therefore be aligned with the instructional activities. Apart from the assessment tasks, it is more important for instructors to provide students with goal-directed feedback to enhance the quality of students’ learning.

Guiding Questions: Designing Experiential Learning Courses

Below is a list of some guiding questions which aim to shape an experiential learning course.