Teaching Perspectives on Experiential Learning in Large Classes

Higher education places an ever-growing value on innovative teaching practices that facilitate learning among students, who will then proceed to integrate it into their professional practices. At the same time, student enrolments continue to grow, and many have drawn attention to complaints that this “massification” equates to a lower-quality learning experience for students (Ahmed, 2016; Hornsby & Osman, 2014). It has also been suggested that experiential learning cannot be effectively accomplished in large classes. We sought to question this assumption and were delighted when our proposal for a Special Issue on experiential learning in large classes was accepted by the Journal of Management Education. We received so many responses to our initial call that it provided an opportunity to edit two separate Special Issues on the topic. The first issue (Clancy et al., 2021) focused on contributions which addressed student engagement with experiential learning in large classes. It showcased a variety of contributions which variously examined how student engagement in large classes can be enhanced through increasing participant diversity (Donovan & Hood, 2021), inviting industry experts to collaborate with faculty on assessment (Lyons & Buckley, 2021), designing unique events that mirror the intensity of an entrepreneurial start-up (Hilliard, 2021) or using multiple sources of feedback that could improve learning outcomes (Black et al., 2021). Other articles demonstrated how the very nature of classes with larger student enrolments could facilitate opportunities for experiential learning that are not replicable in smaller classes (Memar et al., 2021; Page et al., 2021).