What if my experience doesn’t directly fit one of the 6 types of experiential learning?
- The types are a guideline, and we recognize that an experience could reasonably fit in multiple categories (e.g. a trip to gather soil samples could be a field study or research). Refer to the ExL framework for direction. When you decide where a certain experience is most appropriate for your college/department, please stay consistent and use that same experience type for similar experiences going forward.
What will this process look like when we have an experience that continues beyond one semester?
- If an experience extends beyond a single semester, you will need to enter the experience into a work term each semester. If an experience spans from January - December, we ask that you add it to a work term in ELMS in April, August, and December. You will also need to add students to the experience during each semester the experience takes place. This allows us to collect program evaluations from students throughout the experience rather than only at the end of the experience.
Do I select the semester dates as posting and end dates even if the experience isn’t exactly those days?
- We recommend entering the first and last day of classes for the semester in which the experience is taking place, even if the days for the experience are different. However, if that is something you would like to track and have reports on, you can put the actual dates of the experience.
What is the deadline for entering experiences?
- Experiences and students should be entered into the work term (month) that you want the program evaluations to be sent to the participating students before the first of that month. An experience ending after the15th of a month, should be entered before the 1st of the next work term, e.g. an experience ending on May 18th should be entered into the June work term before June 1st. Those students will then receive the program evaluations on June 5th, 10th, and 15th. If an experience ends on May 3rd, they should be added to the May work term because the May evaluation emails haven't yet been sent to the students on May 3rd.
Should we track graduate students as well?
- Yes, we want to track experiences and funding for all the students here at BYU participating in experiential learning, including graduate students.
How do we get students to answer the survey?
- This will be different for every college. Some already have protocols in place such as consistently telling the students to fill out the survey until they do, withholding funding until they have submitted a response, making it a course requirement, etc. Each college/dept should have a process for encouraging students to complete their program evaluations. The better your response rate, the better the data we will be able to return to your college.
How do we report funding that was not directly distributed to individual students?
- When filling out the financial report, there will be a section designated for indirect funds by experience. This will allow you to add up the total amount that was not directly given to students for each experience.