| Learners in most of their academic experiences are passive recipients of information. Learning in this mode has proved to be challenging and non-effective since students tend to memorize concepts and then forget them after a while. Moreover, the level of student motivation and commitment drops sharply as students feel detached from the process of learning. This is evident by the percentage of high school drop outs in the US over the past decade and the problem is getting worse. On the contrary, learning in the experiential mode places the student at the center of the learning process. Over the past several decades experiential learning has been a proven method of instruction for adult learners. The effectiveness of this approach makes it very desirable for institutions of higher education to adopt this method, however; creating a laboratory and running training sessions in real time may be cost prohibitive for most of these institutions. With the advent of technology and development of virtual learning spaces on the web, there is a great potential for the cost barrier to be eliminated or substantially reduced. Over the past several years, virtual environments such as Second Life have created real opportunities for institutions of higher education to use them as efficient tools for delivering instruction. The purpose of this study is to test the feasibility of implementing a proven method of learning such as experiential learning (EL) in a virtual environment (VE). Study results indicate that there are no differences between the effectiveness of the two mediums in teaching decision making using consensus in an experiential mode. Furthermore, the data shows that there are no differences in terms of perceived creativity of group members involved in the virtual group as compared to the face to face group. |
