Improving Holistic Learning through (Urban) Student Engagement with Rural India: A Comparison of Structured versus Open-Ended Experiential Learning

Extended Abstract: Importance of the topic: It is often the case that institutes of higher education, and business schools in particular, are located within larger cities. There are several advantages to doing so including access to a large prospective student population, greater job opportunities for graduating students, higher chances of recruiting and retaining faculty members, and so on. As a result, however, students studying at such institutions tend to miss out on the chance to broaden their perspective of the world – they lack an understanding of life beyond the big cities. As Jesuit institutions, one of our goals to give our students a holistic perspective during their education so that they might be encouraged to find meaning in what they do in the future. At the same time, while creating a holistic experience for our students, we could choose to do so through an open-ended experiential approach or a structured experiential approach. Through our study, we find that giving students a structured experiential approach of an urban-versus-rural contrast can aid in creating a holistic experience. Context: St. Joseph’s Institute of Management is a business school located in the heart of Bangalore city in India. Bangalore is one of the largest cities in India and is often referred to as the ‘IT and VC capital of India’. Over time, it was found that, despite curriculum changes made to include multiple societal perspectives and outlooks, students were lacking a more holistic education at the institute. Therefore, a ‘rural immersion’ program was instituted that included spending time in rural areas, understanding the lives of the people in these places, and even living in villages for a few days to experience life away from the big city. Research Question: In order to improve holistic learning of business school students, which approach is better - open-ended or structured experiential approach – and in what ways? Methodology: Every year, after the rural immersion program concludes, feedback about the program is collected from the students. In 2019 and 2023, we used an open-ended experiential approach, while in 2022, we used a structured experiential approach. Batch sizes for the program were the same through these years. We used one-way ANOVA to compare the student feedback of the program across the years and across the approach used. Findings: Through our analysis, we find that there is a significant difference in the learning achieved between students based on the approached used (F1,349=4.219, p<.05). That is, students who had a structured experiential experience had better learning than their peers who had an open-ended experience. This was re-emphasized through a secondary measure for learning as well (F1,538=3.733, p<.05). Again, in terms of whether the students enjoyed their rural immersion experience (beyond just aspects of learning), those who went for the structured experiential experience reported higher enjoyment scores on average compared to those who had the open-ended experience (F1,538=3.495, p<.10). The next steps in this research include a thematic analysis of the open-ended questions asked in the feedback. This required coding themes to be developed independently by the authors, followed by a discussion to confirm the thematic codes. The authors will then perform a sample coding independently to check the usefulness of the codes developed. Thereafter, coding of the entire three-year dataset will be done independently by all authors in order to better understand the reasons for the difference between the two groups of students (i.e., open-ended or structured approach).