Experiential learning
Apply what you learn in a sustained project, work with feedback, and explain how the experience changes your judgment.
Experiential Learning (EL) designation: approval pending. Your semester project applies computational and AI-assisted methods to a question you choose in public affairs, policy, management, or your research area. It combines sustained project work with preparation, mentoring, reflection, and a final demonstration of learning.
The course follows IU Bloomington’s EL framework. Its design fits the Applied engagement level: you take responsibility for an authentic project over the semester, with regular instructor guidance and structured feedback from peers who try to follow and reproduce your work.
The activity type is Project-Based Learning. You investigate a question whose answer is not known in advance, make decisions whose results you cannot predict, and revise your work as the evidence comes in. Every student builds an individual project on real records from their own field.
Three outcomes you demonstrate
Swipe or scroll the table sideways to read every column. With a keyboard, focus the table and use the arrow keys.
| EL outcome | What you do in P539 | Evidence used in assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Authenticity | Apply and adapt data collection, measurement, analysis, and communication methods to a question about your field, using real records with the gaps, errors, and ambiguity real records have. Revise a method when your data or your purpose calls for it. | The documented corpus and data-quality assessment; the validity and reliability audit; the analysis with its comparison and stated limits. |
| Career Focus | Manage a semester-long project, document it so another person can run it, give and respond to peer review, and communicate results to readers outside your field. | The reproducible project folder and documentation package; the integrative artifact; the final presentation and your answers to questions. |
| Meaning Making | Examine how actual decisions change your ethical judgment, professional values, and responsibilities as a researcher or analyst. | The three individual reflections and the ethics review of your own pipeline, each grounded in specific project evidence. |
How the experience is structured
- Prepare: Weeks 1–3. Set up a project environment, choose a topic, identify who would use the result and whose records you are working with, and draft the direction of the project. Milestone 1 records these decisions.
- Carry out sustained inquiry: Weeks 3–15. Develop one project through data management, concept representation, data analysis, and scientific communication. Each stage builds on the files the last one produced, so an early decision has consequences you live with.
- Use mentoring and feedback: at every stage. The instructor gives feedback on every milestone. Before each of Milestones 2 through 5, an in-class exercise review pairs you with a classmate who tries to follow, code from, or reproduce your work, and the instructor closes with a worked example. Record the feedback that changes your project and your response to it in
memory/DECISIONS.md. - Reflect during and after the work. Reflection 1 on February 17 and Reflection 2 on March 10 examine what the data and measurement work taught you. The final reflection traces how the stages shaped one another and how the project changed your judgment.
- Demonstrate and share learning: the artifact and the presentation. Build an artifact for a named non-specialist audience, present the project, and answer questions about your methods and their limits. Provide the documented workflow needed to inspect and rerun the result.
The six project milestones account for 80 points and the three individual reflections for 20 points. The assignments page lists the evidence each one requires. Practice notes, discussions, and exercise reviews support those submissions and carry no separate grade.
P539 carries 3 credits. All required outside work fits a weekly budget of up to 6 clock hours, including reviews and reflections. The weekly plans ordinarily allocate 2.5–4 hours to exercises and project work, with the balance for reading, writing, and reflection. In-class workshops provide further supervised practice.
Ethics as part of the experience
The required text treats ethics as a practice embedded in research design, not a review at the end. You meet it when you decide which records to collect, when you check whose cases your measurement errors fall on, and when you write a disclosure a reader can verify. In Week 14 you read Chapter 11 in full and write an ethics review of your own pipeline, which is part of Milestone 5.
Access and participation
Discuss barriers involving technology, schedules, accessible formats, cost, or data access early. The course requires no paid software and no paid AI subscription, and the companion’s setup guide includes a browser route that needs no installation. Use the companion’s sample data when part of your own is not ready. Contact the instructor to adapt the arrangements while preserving the learning goals.