Exploring new frontiers of experiential learning landscape: a hybrid review

Abstract

Purpose

Experiential learning is crucial in education, as it offers hands-on, practical experiences that enable individuals to develop their skills and knowledge more engagingly and interactively. In recent years, experiential learning has become a significant aspect of education. To provide academic scholars with a thorough roadmap for further investigation, this study aims to provide useful insights into the bibliometric and content analysis of experiential learning, including keywords, well-known authors, publications, nations and topics.

Design/methodology/approach

This research does a rigorous bibliometric analysis to give a thorough and visually instructional assessment of the evolution and advancement of the literature on experiential learning. Its fast development between 1976 and 2022 is meticulously tracked in the research. By using VOSviewer and Biblioshiny tools, the present study presents a concise overview of 507 records retrieved from the Scopus database using the keyword “Experiential Learning”, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis protocol. Deeper text mining was done using Python libraries “Pandas” and “Natural Language Toolkit” and regular expressions.

Findings

The findings reveal a surge in the number of publications on experiential learning and provide insights, particularly using the theory, context, characteristics, methodology analysis, supporting researchers and practitioners to understand learning better and provide perspectives for future research. Descriptive bibliometric analysis showed that most contributions are from the USA, the UK and Canada. In-depth content analysis revealed five clusters: developments in learning, management education, engineering curricula, organisational learning and knowledge management and entrepreneurship education. The keyword co-occurrence analysis enabled linkages between relevant fields of study and significant research domains. The most commonly used theories were: experiential learning theory, social learning theory, relational coordination theory, empowerment theory, feedback learning theory, effectuation theory and human capital theory.

Originality/value

This study uses information from the Scopus database to do a bibliometric analysis of experiential learning from 1976 to 2022. This study serves as a valuable resource for researchers in the field, helping them to position their work more explicitly within the existing literature and highlighting potential areas for future research. It does this by thoroughly analysing the literature on experiential learning using bibliometrics.

Citation

Azeez, F. and Aboobaker, N. (2024), "Exploring new frontiers of experiential learning landscape: a hybrid review", The Learning Organization, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-02-2023-0022