Abstract:

One of the primary goals of higher education (HE) is to provide relevant training to meet demands students will confront in their careers (Reimers & Chung, 2016). An adaptive challenge, HE pedagogical strategies must therefore understand tensions between learning and technological evolutions that can help sustain student learning while developing relevant technical skillsets (NASPA, 2024; Reimers & Chung, 2016). Experiential learning strategies help foster these skills as they build on students' experiences as part of a cognitive progression in specified course material, leveraging student interests, emphasizing problem solving, and encouraging discovery learning (Bates, 2016). These strategies are therefore particularly appealing for adult learners engaged in technical skill development as they leverage previous experience, connections to relevant applications, and value appreciation for content taught (Kolb, 1984).

However, experiential learning applications may hold inherent differences when designed for use with an integrative or individualized learning paradigm (Ehrmann, 2021). The integrative learning paradigm posits that effective learning strategies are anchored in the use of a variety of kinds of interpersonal interactions, including expert to novice discussions, debates, teamwork, peer critiques, role-playing and competition. In turn, the individualized learning paradigm holds the assumption that students learn best when they each start from what they already know and proceed as quickly or slowly as their learning allows (Ehrmann, 2021). Both can be leveraged in different ways to generate experiential learning opportunities in online, HE environments, especially when the pedagogical goal remains to “provide learners with quality experiences that will result in growth and creativity” (Bates, 2016, p. 18).

This comparative study aims to explore the ways in which experiential learning, when paired with different paradigms, can develop technical skills in two graduate level courses designed for a fully online HE program. The first course, College and University Management, was designed using the integrative paradigm and employed a semester-long group project to engage students in creating a data visualization application for a funding proposal group project. The second course, Fundamentals of Data Science, used the individualized paradigm and engaged students in weekly, scaffolded modules to gain technical knowledge in data applications visualizations. To anchor this comparison between the two approaches, we use the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (2024) Technology rubric to further demonstrate how these two courses employed experiential learning to develop relevant, technical skills in three areas: data use and compliance, digital identity, and digital communication. Understanding these strategies, and how the adoption of one paradigm over the other, could hold implications for how future courses can be developed within the scope of a larger, online curriculum using experiential learning strategies for graduate education.

Keywords:

Experiential Learning, Integrative, Individualized, Online Learning, Graduate Education.