From higher education to workplace learning, organizations are rethinking how learning happens. Experiential learning combines immersive, hands-on experiences with digital innovation to create more engaging, effective, and future-ready learning environments.
We’ve all been there: the typical learning experience. We sit in a room, and we’re inundated with visual and audio information from the “sage-on-stage” and their slides and documents. If we’re lucky enough to be part of an “innovative” approach, we might be inundated virtually instead: bombarded with videos and digitized text content, discussions, and quizzes.
Once we’ve sat, listened, and watched, we’re then expected to recall and often to regurgitate what we’ve learned in order to pass an exam and get a certificate. Then, when it’s all over, we’re expected to somehow translate what we’ve regurgitated into transformative new ways of thinking and behaving.
Be it online or in the classroom, in formal education or in the workplace-learning and development sector, this knowledge transfer (or content dumping) approach to teaching remains the dominant approach globally. But the thing is: it doesn’t work.
The Problem With Passive Knowledge Transfer
When we dump information on people, we’re working against how their brains work. Cognitive Load Theory has proven, again and again, that the brain can only take so much at once. At the same time, Constructivist learning theorists have shown repeatedly that, unless we actively recall and do something with what we learn, we won’t retain it.
What’s the solution? For many, it’s micro-learning; splitting the stuff up into smaller chunks before trying to push it into learners’ brains. This solution misses the point and oversimplifies a more complex problem. This is equally important in online learning, where shorter videos and bite-sized modules may improve convenience, but they do not necessarily create deeper learning unless they are connected to feedback and application.
However much you divide information up, if all you do is see and hear it, you won’t remember it for much longer than a week, and you certainly won’t change your behaviors as a result of it. In a micro-learning scenario, the content dump is smaller, but you’re still stuck in the same old cycle of cram–exam–forget.
What Is Experiential Learning?
So what’s the better answer? Experiential Learning, or learning by doing. Experiential Learning is basically learning by actively doing something in a context that resembles something close to life-like conditions. It’s essentially what a flight simulator is to pilots: simulated environments and challenges that, through trial and error and feedback, develop the knowledge and skills needed to do it in real life.
In the classroom, the Experiential Learning method means replacing traditional chalk-and-talk pedagogy with inquiry, problem-based and project-based learning, transforming the sit-and-listen lecture into the have-a-go, hands-on workshop.
Outside the classroom, Experiential Learning—also known as Work-Integrated Learning—tends to be about learning through service within one’s area of study and expertise.
What Experiential Learning Looks Like Online
In an online environment, Experiential Learning looks like purposeful, applied learning experiences that ask learners to do more than watch, read, click, or recall. It means designing digital environments where learners can investigate a problem, make decisions, collaborate with peers, receive feedback, reflect on what happened, and try again. In other words, the online experience becomes less like a digital textbook and more like a structured simulation of real-world practice.
This might include:
- Scenario-based activities that place learners inside realistic workplace or discipline-specific challenges.
- Simulations, virtual labs, or immersive media that allow learners to test ideas safely before applying them in the real world.
- Project-based tasks where learners produce something tangible, such as a campaign plan, prototype, analysis, strategy, or portfolio artifact.
- Guided peer collaboration, coaching, and feedback loops that help learners reflect on what they did and how they could improve.
- Authentic assessments that measure not only what learners know, but also how well they can apply that knowledge in context.
This aligns well with Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, which moves learners through experience, reflection, conceptualization, and active experimentation. Recent work on online simulations and virtual labs also supports the idea that digital environments can create meaningful experiential learning when they include active participation, reflection, and authentic application rather than passive content consumption.
Why Experiential Learning Is the Future of Education and Training
In the coming years, the Experiential approach will, more than any other single innovation in learning design and delivery, play a disruptive part in the future of both formal education and workplace learning and development globally.
Why? Two reasons:
- It works! Close-to-real-life experience and supported reflection is proven to support learners to not just develop skills, but also to understand and retain complex information in the long term.
- It’s needed! Experiential Learning meets a growing demand from both the global formal education sector and the workplace L&D sector. This is true for next-generation learning experiences that support people to both learn and apply their learning at the same time.
Digital Experiential Learning, with its ability to deliver rich, site-free learning experiences at scale and on demand, is a little explored but potentially doubly disruptive prospect for both formal learning and workplace training. At OES Learning Solutions, we have worked with key clients from the higher education and workplace L&D sectors to design and deliver pioneering, next-generation, digital-first Experiential Learning.
Examples of Digital-First Experiential Learning in Practice
Here are some examples of our past work:
For the UK’s Cabinet Office, we worked with colleagues at the Government Communications Service, designing and delivering a first-of-its-kind, team-based experiential approach to global campaigns and communications training, to connect and upskill communication professionals globally.
At Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), we worked with professors of Solar Photovoltaics, designing and delivering an Experiential Learning MOOC that supports learners to both understand and apply their learning at the same time. Using immersive video, real-life problem-based challenges, teamwork, and coaching not only honed learners’ knowledge, but also developed the skills and behaviors required to apply what they learn.
In collaboration with Pearson’s Fintech Navigator, we designed and delivered a pioneering Experiential Fintech course that not only honed learners’ knowledge but also equipped learners with the skills, behaviors, and artifacts that they need to apply their learning in the real world, through teamwork and immersive activities with “real-life” products (e.g., product prototypes).
We’re incredibly excited to continue to push the boundaries of digital-first Experiential Learning with our clients and partners. Because better learning ultimately means a better world, one better-informed mind at a time.
*Carl Dawson is a co-founder of Construct Education, the predecessor of OES Learning Solutions.
References
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De Jong, D., & Dexter, S. (2025). Experiential learning through simulations in fully online asynchronous courses: Exploring the role of self-debriefing. The Internet and Higher Education, 65, Article 100976. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2024.100976
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Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall. https://books.google.com/books/about/Experiential_Learning.html?id=zXruAAAAMAAJ
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