Collaborative Experiential Learning Model

Abstract

An entrant to engineering has to undergo many fundamental courses in the first year of curriculum. Basic electrical engineering is one amongst these courses. The traditional way of teaching the course was teacher-centric and aid used for teaching was chalk and talk. Less emphasis was given for student interaction. Traditional style of teaching rarely gives students the opportunity to apply their newfound knowledge to actual situations, resulting in a serious time lag between students learning and applying new knowledge. As a result many students have trouble determining the relevance of what they are being taught, and thus lacking any obvious need to learn and fail to engage in the learning process. To provide an opportunity for collaborative experiential learning to reinforce the theoretical concepts imbibed in students we proposed a model on collaborative experiential learning which concentrates on the beginning of instruction referring to Fink's Model containing Knowledge of subject matter, Design of Course, Teacher-student interaction and Course management. In particular, the "Teacher-student interaction" is adopted which is an umbrella term that refers to all the different ways teachers interact with their students. For better interfacing, Kolb's experiential learning theory based on a four-stage learning cycle is applied. In addition to the above interaction in teaching learning process learning style of an individual is important to undergo different learning cycle. The three main types of learning styles are, auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. Whenever the task is given for an individual the above learning styles can be adopted, meanwhile if the task is for a team with different learning style of a student then we need to focus on style of learning. The three styles of learning are active learning, cooperative learning and problem based learning. The proposed model is applied to the course on Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering, Apart from the regular classroom teaching we used principles of instruction to select, plan and develop an activity based on Industry visit to enhance students learning. To realize the impact of learning happened through the industry visit pertaining to topics like actuators and/or sensors, the written examination was conducted and feedback at two intervals, before and after the industry visit was taken. Individual question wise inferential statistical analysis using paired t- test was performed and inferred that the activity improved the knowledge and exposure level of a student.