So Much Fun, They Don't Realize They're Learning: Creating & Implementing Experiential Activities

One of the challenges of teaching business students is meaningfully driving home the concepts in a course. Certainly, this can be achieved through lectures, but many instructors want to engage the students in a more active manner. This is where experiential activities come into play. An exercise can be not only an opportunity to reinforce course material, but it can be fun as well. This paper presents a roadmap for developing one’s own experiential activities and is written by an author who has written a casebook on human resources and is a regular contributor to Cengage, Prentice Hall, Sage, and McGraw Hill for experiential activities associated with business-related textbooks. Here, approaches to writing exercises are provided as well as a step-by-step method for crafting activities for any size group, whether face-to-face or online, and for a variety of time frames from quick, in-class exercises to semester-long projects.