Over 1000 student contributions have been gathered through surveys, focus groups and interviews to evaluate designs featured in this toolkit. While the dataset was primarily analysed at the subject level, it also offered broader insights into what students value in experiential classroom designs. In addition to specific design improvements, themes of authenticity, peer interaction and challenge emerged consistently, offering directions for experiential designs.
Authenticity
Experience is a key element to experiential learning. In lieu of the real-world experience, classroom designs simulate a real-world context, situation or task. For the simulated experience to be impactful, it doesn’t have to be high fidelity. Student reflections reveal that even highly academic activities, such as research, can become particularly meaningful when undertaken in the context of real-world tasks. For example, in Objects as lasting experience design students enjoyed researching artefacts from Ancient Egypt, and it was the artefacts that created the authentic context and meaningful activity:
"…being given the opportunity to feel like a real Egyptologist who has 'discovered' an artefact was really fun, and I enjoyed the process of researching and coming up with a possible theory of how this object fits into the culture of Ancient Egypt."
The ad agency simulation, on the other hand, reproduced the appearance of a professional environment, where students responded to changing demands, considered client perspectives and negotiated ideas. However, the task’s authenticity also derived from the professional thinking and application of theory in a professional setting:
"I found this most engaging because it closely resembled real industry practice. Writing ads for actual products made the activity feel practical and relevant, helping me apply theoretical knowledge in a hands-on way. It also gave me a sense of what working in a real advertising agency might be like."
Another student reflected that engaging in concepts in this way made them more meaningful and easier to learn and understand:
"This was the easiest way for me to understand the concepts that we were learning, and that was entirely useful in applying it to my work for the assignment. When it came time to writing my assignment, I could easily work through all of those steps independently because we had engaged with it in class so many times as a group."
First year Sociology students, who engaged in a scriptwriting activity had similar reflections about learning concepts. Writing everyday dialogues challenged students to explain sociological concepts in the everyday language. Students found this useful to understand concepts:
"I really believe that you only really understand a concept if you can explain it simply so this activity helped me in demonstrating the main ideas of the reading and explain them colloquially."
Additionally, students also appreciated that placing sociological ideas in real-world scenarios opened their eyes to multiple perspectives:
"Drawing on real life scenarios that we may face in real life really helped grasp each side’s perspective in simple, plain language."
360-degree and street-view videos in Stepping into francophone cities, similarly, made the four cities ‘more real’ to students. The videos produced using Google Maps and Google Earth Studio built students’ capacity to ‘better imagine’ each city:
"I have a better capacity to imagine each city, its appearance, its conditions etc."
Overall, students’ reflections suggest that authenticity enriches the learning experience and can be meaningfully embedded in assessment in different ways: through real-world artefacts, tasks, intellectual activities or video-based experiences. Authenticity can also be actively constructed by students themselves, as they apply disciplinary concepts in real-world situations.
Peer interaction
In most designs, students worked together in authentic settings or situations. Not surprisingly, students found peer interaction particularly meaningful. In some designs, this was simply about engaging with their peers in a different mode. This idea came through very clearly among the first year Sociology students who engaged in scriptwriting:
"It was also nice to collaborate with peers in a less serious matter as there were a lot of creative freedom regarding the format of the dialogue."
In the artefact analysis activity, students not only appreciated the collaborative aspect, but specifically what it brought to their learning experience by hearing the diversity of perspectives on the same object:
"I found engaging with other people interesting. I also found it fascinating to see how a few different people interpreted the same object in wildly different ways."
"…the contribution of others opened my eyes to the different ways of interpreting ancient artefacts, and thus deepening my worldview in this respect.”
In a structured collaborative activity Follow the Guide! in an Italian Studies subject, students saw collaboration with peers in a context of skills development. Here, one of the students reflect how peer-to-peer collaboration required clear communication:
"This was very much at every point of the exhibition, you had to work with the other person. And communication had to be really, really clear."
Overall, students enjoy working with their peers and see the value of collaboration. Specifically, they recognised the value of diverse perspectives, and the skills collaborative practice can build.
Challenge
All activities aimed to present students with a productive challenge to promote learning. Students’ reflections demonstrated that the challenge made activities engaging. For example in the Building a chatbot activity, students found prompt engineering both most challenging and most engaging:
"Learning prompt engineering was simultaneously the most engaging and challenging aspect of the chatbot activity as it allowed me to interact with my peers and the software in order to develop a prompt that we approved, and how we could tailor it to our needs to give accurate responses."
Students’ reflections on the engaging nature of the challenge reveal their metacognitive awareness and capacity for self-regulated learning. Both were deliberately fostered through the activity’s multi-stage design and the pedagogical reflection included their final portfolio assignment.
Similarly, in the scriptwriting activity first year sociology students also associated the intellectual challenge the activity provided with engagement:
"It was challenging but engaging to present the theory in an everyday context."
Productive challenge is an important catalyst for deeper learning, and students’ ability to recognise and value challenge as part of the learning process reflects their developing metacognitive awareness, which was both encouraged by qualitative surveys and embedded in the activity designs.