Proceedings of The 6th International Academic Conference on Teaching, Learning and Education
Year: 2023
DOI:
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Experiential Learning in a University Distance Education Setting in an Elementary Teacher Education Program
Sylvie Viola,Emilie Tremblay-Wragg,Cynthia Vincent
ABSTRACT:
To challenge the widespread presence of traditional teaching in the university, we chose to explore how experiential learning can help pre-service students learn the content covered in a course. Through this active strategy, students are led through experiences by following Kolb’s learning cycle instead of assimilating content through formal readings and presentations. The purpose of this research is to determine whether online learning can harness the benefits of experiential learning, as suggested by several writings on the topic. To answer this question, we compared knowledge, confidence and material understanding scores of the 2020 cohort, which took the course entirely at a distance, to those of the 2021 cohort, which took advantage of a hybrid format. In this paper, we will present the foundations of experiential learning, the experimental set-up for the years 2020 and 2021 as well as the data collection tools used, including the questionnaire that students were asked to answer online. Finally, we will draw a comparative picture of the results of the two cohorts that seem to favor experiential learning done entirely at a distance.
keywords: Experiential learning, Active learning, Pedagogical strategies, Distance learning