Leverage Experiential Learning for Quality in Higher Education

Watching movie “Transformers” with my 9 yr old son amazed me to find his knowledge about the historical context of characters in the movie, their technical details to very finer level. This level of knowledge and understanding was similar to my niece aged 7 years, about the Barbie doll and both these phenomenon were reminiscent of my school friend, who barely recollected the title of the poetry in Hindi literature class but had awesome accuracy in reciting each and every dialogue from film Sholay along with details on tone and sequence. All these phenomenon have a common thread;

• ·Each represents a very high degree of retention of knowledge due to an emotional engagement with the subject.
• Learning on the subject either thru discussions with friends or deep belief in the subject, and 
• The learning was not facilitated thru any conventional method like lectures or reading.

Around 1999, I attended a leadership development program which leveraged the experiential learning method by including team based games to create experiences. I had my eureka moment when I learnt few essential leadership aspects at amazing speed and without any external instructions or aid and incidentally these were same aspects that I read books, attended lectures and watched others performing for years, however couldn’t learn as much, as on that day and my eureka moment was to experience the power of experiential learning.

It is important to mention that experiential learning method makes learning memorable - in comparison to traditional education the retention rates associated with Experiential Learning are considerably high. The average retention rates for experiential learning solutions are high, in the 80-90% area.

These statistics are proven by third party research shown in this learning pyramid - a well known piece of research from the National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine.

Traditional learning tends to encompass the top 2 elements of the pyramid - lecture and reading - and as mentioned earlier, the longer-term retention rates of traditional learning (typically lecture and reading based) fall into the 5-10% retention category.

Lastly I like to mention that theories relating to the success of experiential learning are not new, in 1984 a professor of learning David Kolb published a ground breaking book called ‘Experiential Learning - experience as the source of learning and development’ and highlighted that adults learn best through discovery and experience.

I have been advocating and practicing experiential learning on many occasions and situations, be it for bringing about rapid cultural change within organization, rapid adoption of new technology or more recently to facilitate learning for students or managers within organizations on ERP and continue to remain impressed with the outcomes of the experiential learning method. In view of growing concern on the quality of talent produced by education system in India, I am keen to initiate experiential method within higher education layer intending to produce authentic professionals having deeper understanding of the subject.

by Shreekant W Shiralkar who is teaching ERP & Business Intelligence at Management Institutes in India and has authored books on technology and served global organizations at leadership positions. He can be contacted on S_Shiralkar@yahoo.com