Faculty & staff
Go beyond the classroom and enrich the student experience.
The transformative power of EL
Embracing experiential learning can be a game-changer for both faculty and students, which is why Concordia University has focused on experiential learning since its beginnings.
In 2023, Concordia made a commitment to ensure that every undergraduate student graduates with one EL experience, and at least two EL experiences by 2025.
Why we're committed to EL
- By providing all of our students with real-world, hands-on experience, they are better prepared to face society’s challenges and respond to the labour needs of a rapidly changing world.
- Hands-on learning deepens understanding by applying theoretical concepts to practical situations. Students actively engage with the material, fostering deeper comprehension and retention.
- By immersing students in real-world scenarios, we offer them the opportunity to bridge the gap between classroom knowledge and practical skills.
- Embracing experiential learning not only enhances the learning outcomes for our students but also invigorates our teaching methods and increases our teaching satisfaction.
- Experiential learning encourages collaboration between academia and industry, fostering partnerships that bring the latest industry practices into our teaching and can offer more research opportunities.
Ways to integrate EL into your courses
- Real-world challenges
- Capstone projects
- Simulations
- Gamification
- Field trip
- Role play
- Case studies
- Community engagement
- And more!
Integrate EL into your courses
The Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL)
The CTL offers resources on a variety of teaching approaches and related methods, including active learning.
FutureBound
By integrating FutureBound applied skills workshops offered by the Student Success Centre into your course syllabus, you offer your students a step up in their transition from university into the workplace.
City School
Concordia’s City School connects you and your students with a municipal agency or representative in order to solve an urban challenge that needs an innovative and sustainable solution.
Campus Lab
The Campus Lab transforms the university’s campus into a living lab. Create hands-on learning opportunities for students while expanding the research capacity of the campus' operational teams.
How to support individual students
Hire a Concordia student on campus
- Benefit from the talent of motivated students to help you advance your projects by offering a student a paid internship on campus through the Campus Ex-L program, through the Institute for Cooperative Education, or through the Doctoral Student Internship Program.
Become a faculty or staff mentor
- Share your experience and knowledge with an undergraduate student who is planning their future by becoming a Connect Concordia mentor
Send your students abroad on a paid research internship
- The Mitacs International Research Internship Grant supports Canadian senior undergraduate students, graduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows with a $6,000 research award to conduct a 12- to 24-week research project in another country.
Join the experiential learning community
Would you like to learn more about how to offer experiential learning opportunities to your students? The EL Community of Practice offers a space for staff and faculty to connect, share insights, and exchange best practices.
Resources for faculty and staff
You play a crucial role in the student learning experience. Integrating experiential learning into your course is perhaps one of the most rewarding ways of engaging students in educationally purposeful learning activities.
You may be leading an EL activity in the classroom, supervising a student on an internship, or coordinating a co-curricular experience. The forms, templates and guides below may be helpful in assisting you to plan, implement and evaluate your EL activities, and to ensure that students have a safe and supportive experience.
We recommend that you browse through the student resources as well. In some cases, you will find student templates that work together with the activity planning templates that you will find below.
All documents are available for your use and modification as required.
