Moving beyond the textbooks

Termed a quintessential learning format, experiential learning is here to stay, opines Geetanjali Khanna

Albert Einstein once said, “Learning is experience, everything else is information”. And Indian Education is engulfing Einstein’s words like never before.

When my 12-year-old niece wants to buy a “game”, which has a Do It Yourself (DIY) working model on photosynthesis, I know, experiential learning bug has bitten the Indian student too.

Though the concept might look absolutely new, the fact is it was prevalent in our system from a very long time. Gurukul is the quintessential experiential learning format — a learning initiated by an interaction between the learner and his environment. Back in the ages, Gurukul imparted key aspects of education to its students in the form of various activities undertaken in an open environment under the supervision of a guru.

What is it?

Experiential learning is a way of educating based on experience. Skills, awareness, and understanding are acquired outside of the traditional classrooms. The activities may include internships, excursion trips, field study and service-learning job. There are numerous incidents when some renowned professors acknowledged the fact that learning based on experience is highly significant.

Experiential learning in the digital world is a blended form of learning which essentially has rich content forms like field trips, DIY experiments, simple videos, robotics and much more. Experiential learning was witnessed right from the 1930s and was popularised by education philosopher David A Kolb, who, along with John Fry, developed the experiential learning theory in 1984.

Experiential learning requires a series of experiences in the real world setup. The experiences involved are not required to be equally educative with some being more engaging from cognitive, emotional, and physical standpoints.

Some of the benefits of experiential learning are:

* Real world adaptability: There is a general tendency among human beings to take an interest in learning facts that exist in the real world. Experiential learning takes information and data from the real world and makes students aware by doing hands-on tasks. As the students work with real life information, it becomes authentic for them. Additionally, each student’s learning and understanding will be guided by their exclusive past experiences, and thus, each student will approach the task in their own unique ways, thus generating different results.

* Increased motivation and commitment levels: Students are provided an option of their choice of activity thus increasing their engagement and commitment. On the other hand, as the applicant is directly involved in the problem-solving activity or event, the level of commitment is high.

* Mistakes become stepping stones: Experiential learning is based on “trial by error”. As you undertake the tasks, you find some approach works well than others. This allows one to get rid of the methods that don’t work, but the act of trying something and then leaving it – normally considered as a “mistake”, actually becomes an essential part in the learning procedure.

* Honing leadership skills: Most experiential learning activities are involved with students working in teams. These team projects foster leadership and team building skills in the students.

The need for experiential learning is immense and is much required for the rote learning-stricken Indian education system. The fact that a student forgets close to 50 per cent of the information in less than the first 40 minutes of the learning reiterates the need for this style.

Unlike rote learning or curriculum learning, this learning style may happen in a wink, or over days, weeks or months, depending on the topic, and there may be a “wheels within wheels” process at the same time. The CBSE Board has been making attempts to move away from the rote learning dependency and inculcating more application-based learning.

The introduction of Open Text Book Assessment (OTBA), in 2013 for Classes 9 and 11 and in 2014 for Class 10 and 12, has been welcomed with open hands. Further moves to introduce formulas on board question papers, is a step further towards reliance on experiential learning.

IGCSE and IB programmes are known to be application-based and have a broader spectrum of subjects, involving experiential learning in the form of activity-based modules and bookless grasping session. This has resulted in more challenging environments and put students’ knowledge to test, not their memory and speed.

(The author is COO, Fastudent)