Let's hear from one of my undergraduates on how learning by doing compares to the typical college fare of courses:

I believe that professors would be much happier if they did not have to stand in front of a room year after year teaching the same things over and over again. All they do, for the most part, is lecture from the same pile of notes every year. Why can't they simply Xerox their notes, assign the required readings, and expend their remaining undergraduate-designated energy answering specific questions or even better, designing alternative supplementary forms of instruction such as internship programs and research studies?

At Northwestern University, especially, there are so many research projects in progress, I do not understand why students are not encouraged to participate. I was actually quite interested in working in an organic chemistry lab during my sophomore year, knowing that such an involvement would undoubtedly educate me in a much more efficient manner and probably significantly improve my grade as a result. However, I was told that I did not yet have enough experience at the time and that I should come back at a later point in time. In other words, I was being told that I should go play like an idiot in my undergraduate lab and do the same stupid experiment that fifty thousand other students have already done. Then I would be experienced. That really makes a lot of sense!

Instead, I spent my time volunteering at Evanston Hospital. Today, I work in the emergency room as a "nursing assistant." I do hands-on work with every kind of emergency that comes in. I have been a part of the wonder of saving lives as well as the horror of losing them. I have felt the relief, the frustration, the tension, and the happiness, which somehow all mix and mingle in the hospital environment. I have experienced these feelings and have therefore learned.

I learned not only about medicine and emergency treatment, as well as biology and anatomy, but I also learned about life. I learned about people, their fears, their beliefs, and their pain. I learned how to deal with people and how to talk to them, not as individuals on the street, but rather as the disoriented and extremely frightened people they often are during an emergency. I drew knowledge from the doctors and nurses as well, learning how they evaluate people and their problems, and seeing how they handle given situations. Their viewpoints and outlooks on medicine have certainly affected how I think today and will undoubtedly continue to influence me as I continue my education.

Quite honestly, I have learned more from my year of working at the hospital than from my two and a half years of classes at Northwestern. Northwestern has not provided, nor has it facilitated my experiences. The hospital has.

Drawbacks to Learning By Doing

Sometimes it is not practical for students to learn every skill they need to know by actually performing them. We can afford to allow somebody to be a nursing assistant in the emergency room, but we cannot afford, in Groucho Marx's words, to allow that person to be an "amateur brain surgeon." Many tasks either involve too much expense or too much danger to actually let novices perform.

Furthermore, simply placing students in realistic situations is not enough. Such situations let students "try things out," but there are two kinds of trying things out to consider. The first is where one learns by fiddling around and seeing what happens, and the second is one in which a teacher, advisor, or colleague is available who can "look over your shoulder" as you take on a new role. This latter form allows a student to gain from the experiences and observations of others. It allows others to interrupt him and give perspective on what he is doing, sharing with him the experiences of those who have preceded him. In such "mentored role play," the student might never need to ask a question. His actions will precipitate answers. His mentor will wait until the right moment to tell the student what he needs to hear.

One drawback to real-life situations is that they often do not have mentors, in which case they leave out both teaching and history. Trying out a new role without advantage of a mentor can be a slow, frustrating way to learn. It can lead to bad habits or failure to synchronize actions. Teachers provide challenges, encourage risk taking, correct errors, and provide context. Apprenticeship requires the expert as well as the apprentice.

Using Simulators to Teach

Simulations offer a fun and effective way to enable students to learn by doing. By using computer-based simulations, we can vastly broaden the range of things students can learn by doing. The teaching architecture which results is Simulation-Based Learning By Doing. The opportunity this architecture promises is to convert the learning of every possible skill into learning by doing. When it's not feasible to create real-life situations in which learners can engage in the tasks they want to learn, and be coached while they work, simulations must be created that effectively mimic those situations so well that they prepare the student for them without actually having to be in them.

Different Simulators for Different Skills

Tools such as the flight simulator pave the way for a natural, effective way to learn physical skills. The physical world is indeed complex, but we understand it well enough to build complex physical simulations. The world we live in is social as well as physical, so to teach social skills in a similarly effective way, we need to build social simulators. Unfortunately, the social world in which we live is not all that well understood. This is unfortunate because the main province of education is learning how to function in the social world of humans. This is what history is about, this is what literature is about, this is what psychology, economics, foreign languages, and nearly every subject except science is all about. In fact, much of science is about this, too.

The Need for Coaches

Because students learn better when they have the benefit of individualized coaching, any software for learning should contain one or more embedded teachers. The air flight simulator, for example, should have videos of famous pilots. At key moments in the simulation, these pilots should pop up to tell stories targeted to the student's situation, suspending the simulation and beginning a dialogue with the student until he understands the point the "pilot-in-a-box" wants to make. Now, of course, this could be done with human instructors as well, but such instructors are not always available, nor are they all-knowing. Embedding teaching in a simulation allows for the potential of publishing the expertise of multiple teachers, making an array of experts available as needed.

History is also an important component of teaching software. If a student pilot happens to do something that was the very thing that caused a historically famous crash, wouldn't it make sense to stop the simulation and talk in detail about that particular crash? History can be a real guide in learning, especially if it is presented when it is relevant to a learner's current goals, rather than as a dry series of historical vignettes.

We have built a number of social simulations at ILS that provide learning by doing environments. Dustin is an example of a simple simulator built to help students learn a foreign language through learning by doing. Dustin (named after Dustin Hoffman because its goal is to allow you to act your part as a foreign language speaker by teaching you to know your lines) was developed for use by foreign employees of Andersen Consulting. As in any good acting situation, the scene must be set, and the scene for Dustin is a training center in St. Charles, Illinois. The business instruction classes held at St. Charles are conducted solely in English.

Using Dustin

Dustin takes students through a four-step cycle:

1) Present an interesting situation for the student to try out.

2) Allow him to fail.

3) Show him an example of a successful interaction.

4) Allow him to use the knowledge in the example when he tries again.

Along the way, Dustin allows the student to choose the level at which he wants to try things out and gives him a variety of help tools.

This program is intended to help the student remember what to say in different situations and to understand what is said to him. It lets the student practice the English he will need to perform day-to-day tasks, as well as business skills, in the same environment he will be in when he actually visits St. Charles. The situation in Dustin looks a lot like real life.

The simulation sets a stage so that the student can verbally participate (in English) in a variety of different scenes. The program also provides a tutor and various tools (e.g., dictionary, transcript) to help him through the process.

Dustin puts students in charge as they learn a foreign language