- One cold evening, I was stopped by a young man on my way home asking me to draw a smiling face for kids. He then invited me to a charity scheme helping children in need. He said he graduated from a university a year ago, and in a normal situation, he would become a doctor, but he decided not to start a medical career so soon. What led him to this decision was his experience in Nepal, a part of the university educational experience. He was in Nepal after a big earthquake. Being a well trained medical student, he found himself not capable to help the people there simply knowing all the necessary medical knowledge. The place had no basic medicine or equipment at all. He felt so responsible for improving the living condition of other people that he decided to spend some time doing charity before starting his career as a doctor. From his description, I knew immediately what kind of learning experience he was talking about. I have never heard anyone demonstrating so vividly its impact on a student years after the experience. Advocacy for the improvement of human condition is the sixth educational aim of our university. I was so proud that he was a graduate from our university. You've watched examples I recommended in Information Sheet - Experiential Learning. Hope these stories have given you better ideas about what experiential learning looks like. So why experiential learning? What are the core components of this types of learning? What types of learning outcomes it might help students to achieve? What are the basic steps in design? How to assess students? How to facilitate experiential learning? How do students feel about experiential learning? Meet the students and my colleagues to know their experience. - Experiential learning is the type of learning that comes about as a result of an experience. In other words, it's learning by doing. The importance of this type of learning has been recognised by scholars in both the West and the East. For example, in the West by John Dewey and David Kolb. And in the East by Dushyi and Huang Young Li. Now Confucius Kung Fu said, What I hear, I forget, what I see, I remember. But what I do, I understand. When students are engaged in experiential learning, they learn through being immersed in an experience and through reflecting on that experience. And in this way, they develop new knowledge, new skills, and new attitudes. This is the cycle of learning developed by David Kolb to explain the process of experiential learning. Now this cycle starts when the student engages in a hands-on authentic experience. The student then reflects on that experience in such a way that any inconsistencies between that experience and their previous experience understanding can be be reviewed. After this reflection, the student is encouraged to distil their perceptions into abstract concepts and to develop new ideas or modify their existing ideas. And finally, the student returns to the field to test these new concepts or ideas. And this can potentially be a starting point for a new cycle of experiential learning. As you can see, Kolb's theoretical model provides us with some working principles that can help us design experiential learning. No, but when you think about it, many activities have the potential to be experiential. As I mentioned just now, experiential learning has it's own philosophy of learning and theoretical principles, which are independent of the context within which learning takes place. In fact, most activities, including classroom, lab and other traditional on campus learning activities can be experiential if they are designed according to the principles and processes I've talked about. So it's not really where learning takes place that determines whether learning is experiential. It's the kind of learning experience that takes place that determines whether it's experiential. - There are a number of experiential learning programmes in my department. For example, internships, students are required to work for at least six weeks in an industry or any organisations and in any where. Not necessarily in Hong Kong. Some students work in overseas and in the UK or in China or in Shanghai and Singapore and so on. Another type of experiential learning for service learning projects. We brought students to see trends almost in every summer and the very beginning because the intense stuff is very high and count it as a full credit. Experience. And later on after a few years, when most of the construction work had been accomplished, then the level of work decreased, and then we count it as part of the experiential learning full credit course. First of all, we need to understand the requirement of our partner. For example in the Sichuan reconstruction project, we need to understand what facilities, what types of engineering works are required at the school. And then we need to come back and then talk to students and ask them to ask the school to decide. And before the trip, we also need to teach students some basic skills. For example, how to do the cabling installations, how to connect the system together. These basic skills have to be practised in our laboratories before they go to the site. Students will be assessed in a lot of ways. Technically they are required to accomplish the work. They need to build a system, test it, make sure that it works. And also the workmanship should be okay because they are not just doing homework, they are doing something which is real and to be used by the partner school in Sichuan and in many other parts in China. And in this way, their requirement is more than just a piece of work. They need to make sure that they can meet certain safety standards and efficiency and so on. So beside technical assessment, we also need to assess the attitude and also whether they can achieve the learning outcome. This can be assessed by asking them to write a professional report and also by the end of the project they are required to do a presentation in front of not only our teachers but also teachers from the partner universities in order to show us that they have really learned something and also what they have learned and also what they have gained in this project. First of all, you need to understand the requirements and the requirements will be different years to years from locations to locations. So sometimes we have the schools build a system. Sometimes we have them build e-learning system. So it depends on the requirement. And we need to teach students different skills. And I think this is not the worst. The most difficult part is that, how we can communicate to the students what the learning objective, the learning outcome and I don't want our students to go there just as a trip, for fun. I want them to do something really meaningful. Also I want them to know that this is a mission. This is not just a service trip, not just for fun, to go with their classmates together. They have missions to do something really helpful to the people there. So I think this message is important. And the most challenging part is to convince them, to motivate them with this passion. - I think that to facilitate experiential learning there's two parts of it. We were supposed to pre-train to the students so that they would learn more about how they could go, like what you are expected to do. So we have workshops where we talk about what we're gonna do in the place and also about who is going to do other jobs, so we have an idea about that. Also we have another part which is also very important is the actual on-site work. So when they are doing it we try to give them help when they have some difficulties. And I think it's quite good that as an engineering student and an engineering graduate, I think both student and TAs would have knowledge by themselves so that they would know what to do when they are in the place. I think it's not like supervision work, it's more about the student being able to learn from the experience that would be making mistakes and learning from it. And also it tries to interact with the place that they are going to so that they could learn from the people over there. And also try to transfer some of their engineering and other disciplines and knowledge to the people there. I think the major part of the project, which is doing work and facilitation to the place is relatively easy, relatively straightforward because as an engineering graduate as well with a student who are also in an engineering background, things are pretty straightforward. We all understand how engineering is supposed to work. But some other things, such as, working with a partner over there, and also work with different parties and also there are so many students, the logistics and safety, that kind of thing is pretty new to us. As an engineering student before we never needed to worry about these kind of things. But once you turn into a TA, this kind of situation will be something that is very important to us. Especially something that is very interesting as well is that we also need to not cater but to be a family with the student. We enjoy being in the company of each other so that everything will go very smoothly. Well for me, as a student before, I think being able to enjoy the place and also learn from it is really important. Doing work, or doing normal routine work, to a student, you can get this kind of experience anywhere. But what you can't get is going to a different place, meet with the local people and get along to a new, different environment, is something that you can't get by staying home. So, as a tutor, I think we also encourage the student to explore more around the place, to get connected, both intellectually and emotionally to the place. So that they could have a bigger, wider view to the globe. Although our project's in China, but there are also other projects in different places. I think by going to a different environment, different than what we've experienced before, could really benefit the students so that they could grow from it and be more mindful to the world. - It's a lot more independent. So I interned in the Manchester Enterprise world. So it was me and two other guys in there. And we worked for a local charity in Manchester and developed a marketing plan. So it was a lot more interesting because it put skills you had learned in the classroom into real life. It was quite rewarding as well because it was charity they didn't have a big budget, they didn't know what to do, they haven't got the resources they needed. So we kinda helped them, said you can to this this and this. They didn't have many staff, didn't have time to do a lot of stuff we done for them. So we spoke to local businesses and authorities and helped them that way. So it was quite rewarding. The stuff they've taught you, you can actually do something with it. So it's quite good to see the effects of it as well. - What we are learning in class is really, really different from what we learned in experiential learning. In my case, internships. Basically, my intention was mostly in Autocad, that's a software we use for designing. Designing homes, designing buildings and everything. So in class, we were only taught five hours of that software. But over there I was working full time on that software. And I was actually experiences the real activities, the real life kind of problems that are faced in real life actually. So basically, this kind of tale, this kind of internship taught us what we're not taught in the lectures. I can say the lectures only tells us the base of the learning. The actual learning is done in experiential learning or internships in my case. - I think it is definitely very inspiring and is intellectually stimulating as well because in traditional learning we focus on acing the exams or getting an A in an assignment. But experiential learning is different from that. It's more about knowing what's going on in life and how to apply the knowledge we learned. Or if we can't apply the knowledge we learned in lectures and exams, we can always learn more about the world. For example, the recent technology development or business trends as well as the needs of local people that we're helping in service trips or basically a lot more about the world outside. - I think the skills from the classroom can actually be put to use. So it's quite good to work for a company, see what they needed, requires, how does this fit into what we learned, how can you build upon that, what are they looking for. So it's just stuff like that in general. - I learned how it works, how we collaborate with other people from other divisions like civil engineering, architectural, and how we make things work, how many companies are working together on a single project. And how the co-ordinate with each other and how we deliver our work. - The most important thing, I think I would be about caring for other people other than ourselves. Because a lot times when we have a start-up business or we work for somebody, it is not always about helping the company it's also about giving back to society as well. So I believe other than the things we learn which will help our career, I think we can also give back to the community and see to our needs. And it doesn't have to be sacrificing the company's benefits but rather we can focus on how to incorporate other's needs or society's needs into a project or into our goals. - I would say that it's also some other thing that we learn from doing as well. Because engineering discipline sometime may not be talking too much about life. Like soft skills, not like in some other faculties or disciplines. But by doing this kind of project I think both students, as well as a tutor, myself, would learn more about interpersonal skills and also would be able to interact with the people there. So it would be in this way beneficial. - Sometimes it's difficult because there's quite a lot of pressure on you. It's the work of a real business, you don't know what they're actually looking for, if it's gonna be useful to them. Sometimes the communication is quite difficult because they are so busy, we wait quite a while for a response from them. So you have quite a lot of responsibility in a way. 'Cause you're like acting but on behalf of them but not fully with them. So we're like, age and stuff, they're like us. - Yes, of course, like I told you before the software I was working on, they taught me like a little bit of the software in school. But basically I was working full time on their software. So when I started my internship I knew a little bit of their software but they were using the advanced level of that software. And we also were allowed to use the outdated version of their software in school. So basically, I had to first focus on how to work on the software and then to start working. So that was my biggest challenge when I started my internship. - I've been to a service trip before and it is pretty physically demanding because we only get five to six hours of sleep each day because the schedule was pretty packed. So every day we would go visit different organisations and see the needs of different people that needs help. For example, those who are mentally handicapped and those who are underprivileged and doesn't have anywhere to live. And sometimes in that programme we actually helped build some houses for them and it was pretty tiring after a long day and not having enough sleep and it was really cold. So I would say experiential learning isn't that comfortable some times or isn't as comfortable as compared to traditional learning. - I hope you have a better idea now about what experiential learning is and what it involves. When I was conducting coding and editing in the interviews I constantly saw some connexions. One of them is between our university aims and what students gained through experiential learning. Some of them, especially the second one and the last one are often mentioned as difficult areas to address in teaching. So I guess based on what students said experiential learning might be a good option for this type of learning outcomes. The second connection I saw was between experiential learning and students expectations of university education. If you remember, in module one, the students I interviewed told us their expectations of university education is to acquire practical skills, increase their employability, meeting different people, learn to collaborate, obtain international experience and so on. They also mentioned they liked their learning to be related to real life, have hands on opportunity and allow room for application and creativity. It seems that experiential learning is giving them what they want. The third connection I noticed emerged when students said what they learned was sometimes out of date. Relating it to a topic we discussed in module one, how a new academic can achieve a synergy between research, teaching and service. I guess there's actually one thing we can try, involving yourself in service to keep your teaching and research up to date. Which will then help you provide higher quality service as well. If you are to lead students to real world for experiential learning, there are a lot of things you need to take care of. That is why Wilton has a team of teaching assistants working with him. One thing impressed me most in the interview was responsibility that a student mentioned. Indeed, when students work with partners in the outside world, it's no longer a discussion in a classroom or a plan on paper. There will be real consequences. It can can be very rewarding if what they do leads to positive impact. As teachers, we need to be careful about possible negative impact too. What you watched is a general introduction to experiential learning. Please do remember, experiential learning doesn't have to be out of classroom. What you saw was only one example. In the first module I have invited you to think about teaching and learning spaces. Will you consider experiential learning for your teaching? If you want to know more about experiential learning this book can be very helpful.
