Why Experiential Learning Works In the Classroom and Online

Experiential learning has earned its place in business education for a simple reason: it asks people to do the work, not just understand it intellectually. When learning is built around decisions, trade-offs, and consequences, people don’t just absorb concepts—they test them, misuse them, correct them, and remember them.

That value has been clear for decades in classroom-based simulations. What has been less clear—and often questioned—is whether those same benefits survive when learning moves online. It’s a fair question. And an important one.

What Experiential Learning Actually Provides

The benefits of experiential learning are often described in general terms: engagement, participation, realism. But for business acumen learning, the value is more specific. Well-designed experiential learning forces people to:

• Make decisions without knowing the outcome in advance
• Confront trade-offs rather than optimize a single metric
• Interpret results that don’t match their intent
• Notice patterns that emerge only over time

These experiences are fundamentally different from explanation-based learning. They don’t rely on someone telling participants what matters; they rely on the system showing them, repeatedly, through consequence. This aligns with Kolb's (1984) assertion that experience is the source of learning and development.

Why Classrooms Support Experiential Learning So Naturally

Classroom simulations work not only because of the model, but because the environment quietly supports the experience. In a room, there is energy. People feel the pressure of the clock. Teams react to each other. Facilitators can see confusion, hesitation, or momentum and intervene in real time. Physical materials slow people down just enough to encourage discussion and reflection. None of this is accidental, but much of it happens without deliberate design. The room carries some of the load.

So when people ask whether experiential learning works online, what they are often really asking is whether those invisible supports disappear—and whether the learning collapses without them.

What Actually Changes When Learning Moves Online

Some things do change, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help. Explanation becomes less reliable online. In a classroom, facilitators adjust explanations moment by moment based on what they see. Online, silence is ambiguous. It can mean understanding, distraction, or disengagement. Relying on explanation as the primary driver of learning becomes riskier.

Repetition also feels different. In a room, repeating decision cycles feels like action. Online, repetition can feel mechanical if nothing meaningful changes from one round to the next. Without physical cues and shared urgency, design choices matter more.

And facilitation changes as well. Online facilitators can’t be everywhere at once, and they can’t compensate for unclear models or delayed feedback without adding significant cost and complexity. These shifts don’t make experiential learning impossible online; they make design more important.

What Carries Across Formats

What survives the move online surprisingly well are the core elements that make experiential learning work in the first place. Decisions still matter. Consequences can still accumulate. Patterns can still emerge. People still have to reconcile results with intent and decide what to do next. In fact, online environments can support consequence-driven learning especially well when outcomes are built directly into the system rather than supplied by a facilitator.

When feedback is immediate, visible, and tied clearly to decisions, people don’t need explanation to understand that something went wrong—or right. Online delivery also introduces some quiet gains. Lower visibility can reduce anxiety around financial topics, making some participants more willing to try, fail, and adjust (Huang & Liaw, 2018). Hierarchy can flatten when decisions are made individually or in small teams before being compared. Repeatability becomes easier, shifting learning from a single event to a series of encounters where recognition builds over time.

The Medium Changes. The Learning Process Does Not.

The test that applies both online and in person is this: if removing the facilitator or the room causes the learning to collapse, the experience wasn’t carrying its own weight. In classrooms, facilitation and presence can mask weaknesses in the underlying design. Online, those weaknesses become visible quickly. If outcomes feel arbitrary, if cause and effect can’t be traced, or if repetition doesn’t reveal anything new, engagement drops—not because the learning is online, but because the system isn’t doing enough of the work.

When experiential learning relies on explanation and presence, it struggles to scale. When it relies on decisions, feedback, and consequence, it travels well.

So Does Experiential Learning Work Online?

The more useful question is not whether experiential learning works online or in person. It’s whether the experience itself is designed to stand on its own. When learning is built around decisions people own, consequences they can interpret, and repetition that reveals patterns over time, the format becomes secondary. When learning depends on explanation, energy in the room, or constant facilitation, moving online exposes those dependencies quickly.

That difference is easy to miss—and expensive to ignore. For organizations deciding how to deliver experiential learning, the choice isn’t between classroom and online. It’s between experiences that rely on their environment to function, and experiences that carry the learning themselves.

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References

• Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice Hall.
• Huang, Y. M., & Liaw, S. S. (2018). Exploring Learners' Behavioral Intention toward E-Learning via the Technology Acceptance Model. Computers & Education, 118, 1-10.
• Garris, R., Ahlers, R., & Driskell, J. E. (2002). Games, Motivation, and Learning: A Review of the Literature. Simulation & Gaming, 33(4), 441-467.