7 Questions on Experiential Learning at Indiana U
Advertising students at the Indiana University School of Media have the opportunity to work on real-world projects for big-name clients such as Adobe and Microsoft, honing their skills as they solve complex marketing problems and craft messages for a target audience. And in a recent project for learning platform Spaces Learning, their creative efforts converged with an exploration of education innovation and the digital space of a university. We spoke with Professor of Practice Bill Schwab about the importance of experiential learning in higher education, the impact of AI on digital skills, and more.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Campus Technology: How do you incorporate experiential learning into your courses?
Bill Schwab: I come from many years in the advertising industry and gradually transitioned into teaching. And one of the things that I faced when making that transition is: I can't believe I actually know so much about this particular subject. How in the world will I ever break it down effectively to a group of students? I started with reading a lot of books about advertising and how it works and all that stuff, but as I taught more and more, I gradually realized that the best thing is to just have the students do some advertising. That allowed me to not have to figure out in advance how I'm going to teach every single thing, but rather make corrections or adjustments as we go along. If you're a good teacher, you can pay attention to what people need, at what time they need it, and go into it and help them. So experiential learning is a big part of how I teach.
I'm always looking for projects that have some meat and gravitas to them. We mix in some fun little projects that tend to be easier, but I find that those work best after students have taken on something that's more complex — something that an advertising person would get involved in, in the real world. So over the years I've brought in different clients: We did a great project for Adobe; we've done some projects for Microsoft; and then we had this Spaces Learning project. I guess a good way to say it is that we have word of mouth. The students have been successful developing work for clients, those clients say, "Hey, this classroom of students did some great work for me," and other projects come about from those client references.
CT: How do you choose what companies are a good fit to work with? Are there certain criteria that make something a good real-world project for students?
Schwab: A lot of times, students will be given an assignment and the work is fun, it looks compelling, but it has very little to do with the challenges of advertising and marketing. It doesn't have a relationship to what you actually need to understand and execute when you're doing advertising. So I try to close that gap a little bit and choose something that students can relate to, where there's some connection between the brand and their life experience, and then see if they can express a marketing goal based on that connection and the resources they have to work with. And it doesn't hurt to have a great brand name in their portfolio.
CT: Can you walk through the project specifically with Spaces Learning — what were they looking for and what did the students do?
Schwab: Spaces Learning is essentially a learning management system. It has an interesting story in that it was developed by a professor at Clemson University to tackle a challenge that lots of professors are faced with when they are teaching a high-level course in a university: There's only one professor who has special knowledge in that area, and it makes it difficult for all the students who want that knowledge to get into that course. So that Clemson professor developed a learning system that allows a much larger number of students to participate and be educated effectively in the course. It's not by any means a shortcut to getting the knowledge; it's a way to deliver an enormous amount of knowledge to more students.