Encouraging students' experience-based learning through their studies in an e-learning environment: Two Schematic Storyboards

This paper addresses the importance of students' experience-based learning in virtual settings of higher education and some practical approaches for fostering their experiential learning facilitated by e-learning platforms. These practical approaches try to extend students' learning beyond the theoretical disciplinary focus inside the universities and engage them in acquiring knowledge and more importantly skills they will need in their professional life. To do so, two schematic storyboards have been drawn based on the experiences of some Iranian experts including students, entrepreneurs and academics represented through some focus groups. The titles of these storyboards are: “Business Plan Writing”, and “Tentative start-up of a business”. Our primary focus is on defining some technical and pedagogical capabilities in an e-learning platform based on the three groups of experts' experiences as well as principals of experience-based learning, enabling both students and tutors to use them for creating a more practical, real and effective teaching-learning environment. Before drawing each storyboard four descriptive components named Functional Specifications (FS) have been written, trying for defining different aspects of the storyboards. These components have been generated based on the participants' experiences and then supports from the literature has been extracted and added to these FSs. While the paper is written from an e-learning perspective, the issues and processes raised are applicable to any higher education system that seeks to value and reward practical and experience-based education.