Overview

The Experiential Learning Center was established to oversee new approaches to teaching and learning in which students learn by doing, and simulate real world work experience.

The Scenario-Based Learning in Technical Education Project

The ELC’s primary project, Scenario-Based Learning in Technical Education, was funded by NSF to design, develop, implement and test an experiential learning model as a capstone course for technician level IT students in a hybrid environment. The model is based on the Story-Centered Curriculum currently employed at Carnegie Mellon University-West, with adjustments for our community college population.

Project Goals

• Create 22 new scenario-based tasks for up to four different technical fields to add to our past project's seven (7) tasks and disseminate in an open-source online curriculum library to technical community college instructors throughout the United States.
• Establish online communities that bring together and foster the success of technical faculty who are designing and implementing scenario-based tasks.
• Emphasize development of an Assessment Tooklit of quality assessment instruments that will be distributed along with the tasks.
• Build the knowledge base about the best strategies for integrating real world scenarious and active learning approaches into community college courses focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics content.

A New Learn-By-Doing Model

Based on workplace scenarios and teamwork, the “story” is a coherent framework, an E-Commerce start up company, that has the student working on both long-term objectives and day-to-day operations. Faculty and mentors from industry facilitate students' learning as they work to achieve the course objectives.