​This is a great article. Click the title of the article to go to The Chronicle of Higher Education to read the article.

No Textbooks, No Lectures, and No Right Answers. Is This What Higher Education Needs?
By Beth McMurtrie FEBRUARY 10, 2019 

I use project-based learning methods.
​I have my marketing students work with a local company or non-profit organization (their choice). The end product from the course - usually a segment analysis, or a marketing or promotion plan - is not pre-defined. The students have to figure it out. 
My students get frustrated. I know, because they write about how they didn't get step-by-step instructions in the end-of-year reviews of my teaching. 
The students want detailed, step-by-step instructions. I give them - through lectures, textbook readings, articles, and current new examples - the foundational knowledge that they need to complete their projects. I make myself available to mentor and coach them - to answer any questions they have - every day of the week.
The students have to apply that knowledge to a messy and complicated real-life problem to help a local business owner or non-profit organization manager. That is what they will do after they graduate.
I live with the negative comments in my course reviews because I know they students will benefit in the future.

#highereducation #unca #uncasheville #projectbasedlearning #learningfromexperience #education

​For my education and geekier friends . . . 
My analysis of experiential learning interview data from the campus of a large American university in Asia is underway. I've moved all transcripts into Excel for coding. Contact me if you are interested in this process, as it provides a useful method to code, and then to sort and export the data for the next stages of analysis.

The table below shows the categories of interview participants. I may trim a few, but at this time, I'll have 19 first interviews and 19 second interviews. I'd be happy to share information about the two-stage process I used for the interviews . . . or you could read the dissertation when it is published. ;-)

My current activities involve completing the initial coding process. The interviews contain wonderful insights from students, instructors, and administrators. Now my task is to make sense of the data (e.g., see Coffee & Atkinson, 1966) with initial codes. Then I will be looking for categories that group common codes, and finally, for themes.

​Reference

Coffey, A., & Atkinson, P. (1996). Making sense of qualitative data: Complementary research strategies. Thousand Oaks, CA, US: Sage Publications, Inc.

#qualitativeresearch #dataanalysis #interviewdata #experientiallearning