OEL is on a mission to ensure that every MIT student has access to high-quality experiential learning opportunities that help them advance their personal and professional goals. We collaborate with programs, students, and staff in Institutional Research to understand and address barriers to participation and develop strategies for continuous improvement.
Reports
Experiential Learning for Everyone
This report, finalized in September 2023, summarizes key findings from the initial year of data collection and outlines recommended action items and open questions to investigate.
Why Experiential Learning
Matters
MIT boasts many Experiential Learning (EL) programs ranging from credit-bearing courses, undergraduate research, venture incubators, global internships, public service opportunities, and more. It is an essential part of an MIT education, baked into our institutional motto (mens et manus) and MIT’s long history of “learning by doing.” Research shows the critically important outcomes of EL, including but not limited to (a) higher-order thinking skills, (b) communication skills, (c) ability to work effectively with others, and (d) subject-specific learning outcomes (Coker et al., 2017).
We know that EL is critical to students’ academic experiences; yet at MIT, the decentralized nature of EL programming makes it difficult to see the full picture of who is– and perhaps more importantly, who is not– participating in and benefitting from these programs.
Research Questions
A 2022 working group of MIT experiential learning staff recommended that OEL study the following questions:
- Who is participating in EL, and who is not? (Overall and by program, program characteristics, and student demographics)
- How do we understand student participation at various stages of the EL process: program application, selection/yield, and completion? What demographic patterns are present at each stage?
- What are the barriers to students participating in EL?
- Which factors draw students away from/towards certain programs?
Data collection efforts from Fall 2022 through Spring 2025 have focused primarily on questions 1, 3, and 4. While we have been able to learn more about potential barriers at various stages of the EL process, we learned that data collection at those stages is less robust and therefore have focused our quantitative data analysis on participation rates.
The group also recommended that further work specifically assess differences in outcomes, and work is ongoing to build outcomes assessment capacity within more EL programs to enable this analysis.
Project Status
As of July 2025, OEL has collected three academic years’ worth of participation data and program details. Institutional Research has created dashboards for internal use within OEL and participating programs to inform ongoing efforts to ensure student access to their programs.
In 2024, OEL also conducted a series of interviews with undergraduate and graduate students about their experiences searching for, applying to, and participating in experiential learning programs at MIT. The results of this analysis were shared with relevant programs to inform improvements.