How experiential learning is changing the landscape of Higher Education.
Gone are the days when colleges and employers select students based on grades and marks. Though they help students stand out from the rest, high marks and good grades don’t necessarily mean they are “ job ready .”With almost 6 million students graduating in India, less than 30% of them find jobs. Though the employment rates have shown a positive trend, a considerable demand still has to be met in the jobs market.
The current job market is exceptionally competitive for college students and graduates. Students must desperately pursue any options to make them stand apart from the rest of the lot. Internships, volunteer programs, and other research projects help build their profile and make them favorable in such situations. Further, a study reveals that companies with more than 100 employees hire their interns for full position roles upon graduation. Another study shows that the demand in the Indian jobs market is not met due to the low supply of people with the necessary skills despite having excellent academic records to vouch for them. This raises a fascinating question: What makes a student stand out other than his marks?
So, where exactly are we going wrong, or what steps should educationalists take to improve this situation?
David Kolb, a prominent thinker of the 20th century, brought together the works of many thinkers and put forward the experiential learning theory. He famously said, “Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience .”The approach emphasizes learning from experience.
But this is not something new to us. Since ancient times, the Indian educational system or the gurukul system incorporated experiential learning. Students were expected to perform their daily duties and chores to teach humility and discipline and were engaged in practical activities to learn about the concepts. The evolution of the education system has transformed the landscape on which students are now graded. In an exciting turn of events, the demand now is leaning towards people who can apply skills they have learned in their textbooks and soft skills that can’t be learned from a textbook in a real-world scenario.
Several steps are involved in the current and modern form of experiential learning. Though the steps may have different names at different institutions, they essentially boil down to these methods.
Experiencing :
The first step involves students performing hands-on and mind-on experiences with little to no guidance from the instructor.
Sharing:
After that, the results of the experience from all the students are shared with the other students. This directly equates to what they found and relates it to different past experiences that can be used for future use.
Generalizing and application:
Students then try to target the real-world problems with their own experience from the experiment or project that they conducted in a classroom. Then it is applied directly to effectively solve a real-world problem, with instructors playing a pivotal role in ensuring they feel a sense of ownership of what they learned.
The steps mentioned above break the traditional classroom setup where increased peer competition is just for marks, with highly structured instructions. This learning process has a semi-structured instruction framework and motivates students to think and apply concepts.
Another dimension to experiential learning is bringing industries close to academia. Students should be given a head start in making career choices by providing them with the necessary platforms to learn and understand available options. This traces back to the importance of educational institutions partnering with industries and other mentorship platforms and career advisors, which aim to develop several soft skills.
Understanding these problems, the national education policy of 2020 aims to integrate experiential learning at all stages of learning. Hands-on learning, arts-integrated and sports-integrated education, and story-telling-based pedagogy, among others, as standard pedagogy within each subject and with the exploration of relations among different topics, are some of the new policy implementations of the NEP 2020
The world we live in constantly is pushed forward with evolving technology. An engineering student learning a concept in his first year can become outdated when he graduates. Information being more accessible now than ever, all stakeholders, i.e., students, professors, industries, and intuitions, must adapt and evolve with time. This argument can be extended to experiential learning itself. Ten years from now, the industry might demand something different, and as educationalists, we must be ready to meet that demand.
I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.
~ Confucius, 450 BC
