HOW TO PORTRAY PROFESSIONAL REALITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION SETTINGS? USING EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING AND MULTICULTURALISM TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE-ACQUISITION

This article describes a collaborative learning activity carried out during the academic year 2014/2015, which specially focused on Millennials (also known as Generation Y) Through this activity, a set of 60 undergraduate students attending classes in the School of Social Sciences of the University were the authors work as a teachers, played various tasks (i.e., market research, segmentation, designing a business strategy, developing campaigns in mass media, etc.). The goal was to emulate the required steps and procedures to develop a real International Fair of Tourist Destinations. This activity, which was conducted by using “flipped classroom” as a teaching methodology, improved the learning process, achieving results in line with the principles of the Experiential Learning Theory (TAE); which emphasizes the key role of experimentation and experiences in every single learning process.

Two online questionnaires at the beginning and end of the course 2014/2015 were distributed in order to verify whether the objectives set for this teaching innovation activity were achieved. Specifically, the 60 students who participated in this activity were invited to rank from 1 (very low) to 5 (very high) their opinion about the way in which the activity described in this article helped them to develop the following skills:
1) teamwork (measured through the use of specific software for project management that allowed them to coordinate different tasks they had to carry out);
2) responsibility;
3) leadership;
4) professional experience-integration;
5) conflict resolution;
6) communication skills;
7) use of new technologies (assessed through the use of new digital tools applied to the tourism sector); and finally,
8) innovation (measured through the creation of products and services tailored to the specific characteristics of the stands they had to manage in the Fair).

In order to increase the survey response rate, anonymity was guaranteed in both questionnaires. The Cronbach’s alpha value associated with each item was higher than 0.75, which allows us to confirm the inexistence of any multicollinearity issue. Moreover, data gathered through both questionnaires were analyzed through a t-Student analysis. In particular, regarding “professional experience-integration", "communication skills", "use of the new technologies" and “innovation”, results were statistically significant It is also worth mentioning that students showed a proactive attitude during the whole activity, which positively affects their learning process and confirms the literature about the importance of undergraduates motivation belonging to the Generation Y.

In short, the activity discussed in this work facilitated the acquisition of an integrated vision through a multidisciplinary and an intercultural approach. It was also of help to develop and strengthen different competencies and skills highly valued in the workplace. Moreover, this activity helped students to achieve a professional experience-integration approach, thereby achieving goals which are consistent with the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).