The Business Capstone Experience of a Real World, Work-based Project
Experiential Learning in Business Education
Doing by Learning, the title of the book this website supports, more accurately describes the typical experiential learning process and for Business students engaging in a real, work-based capstone project. Business-related experiential projects ask students to integrate and apply years of conceptual frameworks that have been learned in multiple disciplines of Business. When you engage in this capstone, you are actively “Doing” on the foundation of your “Learning” or, said more succinctly in the book title, Doing by Learning.
What comes first: Doing or Learning?
Virtually everyone involved in any form of experiential learning from ropes courses to internships has used the well-worn phrase of “learning by doing” to describe the learning process. How many of us, when asked to reflect on our best learning experiences agree that it came from a “hand’s on” experience and that we learn best when we actually do something?
Consistent with this, students regularly report that some of the most impactful and life-changing learning has come, not in the classroom itself, but later through the application of classroom-based knowledge in a real-life challenge. In other words, before the doing there was learning.
The point is that, especially for students, the learning associated with the “doing” happens on the back of some level of prior knowledge. Whether in learning a musical instrument, a sport, a technical skill or financial modeling there is some a priori conceptual knowledge providing the gateway to the learning experience. The Doing (learning from concrete experiences) happens through some Learning that jump starts the familiar cycle of experiential learning!
My Doing by Learning
My Doing by Learning is an invitation to join other Business Capstone students before you who have adapted the Doing by Learning model and make it your own. My Doing by Learning is about setting your own path in a Business Capstone project by using a structured approach to integrating and applying the Business education program, at any level, that you are just completing.
The method outlined in this book asks you to reflect upon the key takeaways from your Business degree program. The Business curriculum competencies you have just mastered provide a framework for your inquiry that frames your capstone project. This is the backbone of your experiential project as you wade into the waters of inquiry in a work-based, real world project.
“As learners, we all tend to underemphasize the reflection and observation part of the learning process. If you think back to examples of your most transformational learning experiences they probably all share some form of reflective inquiry at the outset.”
