Treffer: Bringing Teamwork and Experiential Learning to Large First Year Classes: The UTSC Approach and the Student Perspective

Experiential learning and having students work in teams are two educational contexts that allow students to exercise the sorts of skills that bring success in post-graduation life: skills like critical and creative thought, effective communication and collaboration, and the ability to not only see one's strengths and weakness, but also the skills needed to grow personally. Typically, these sorts of experiences are only offered in smaller upper-year courses simply because of the logistics involved in managing such work. This paper argues that the development of such skills is too important to wait until third or fourth year, especially given the accelerated advance in AI technologies which make these human skills more important than ever to student success. In this report, the University of Toronto Scarborough Approach to Teamwork and Experiential Learning is described, which works even with extremely large first-year courses. Research data is given, describing an implementation of this approach within an 1800-student introductory course and showing that not only can such an approach be used without causing student dissatisfaction, but rather, students find it interesting, see its value, and feel competent throughout.

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