Deepening Skills

High impact learning experiences

High impact learning experiences are long-term practices deliberately designed to support student success. Their impact stretches beyond your time on campus and spills over into your career. These practices encourage you to collaborate and interact meaningfully with peers and faculty, apply what you are learning to real world situations, and reflect on and deeply integrate what you are learning.

Since 2015, Gallup has demonstrated that six experiences have a strong relationship to long-term life outcomes such as positive workplace engagement and personal wellbeing. Those experiences were:

having a professor who made you excited about learning.
having a professor who cared about you as a person.
having a mentor who encouraged you to reach your goals.
working on a long-term project.
completing an internship or project that applied classroom learning to real life.
being active in co-curricular activities and organizations.

What are high impact learning experiences? They include:

capstone courses and projects
first-year seminars and experiences
internships
undergraduate research
study abroad or other intensive global learning experiences
writing-intensive courses
courses with significant collaborative assignments and projects or team-based learning
learning communities
field-based experiential learning

What is High Impact Learning?

Description of the video:

Welcome to Learning IU. My name is Hannah and I will be guiding you through your journey here, I U with the help of your fellow students. These videos will help you learn how to study smarter, grow professionally, stay healthy, and fine tech. Have you heard of high impact learning experiences? These experiences are designed to support your long term success, whether in school or your future career. These practices require deep level processing where both acquiring information and understanding how to use it. You will synthesize and apply knowledge by working closely with your peers and professors, applying what you're learning to real world situations and reflecting on your learning in a meaningful way with frequent feedback. Trust me, these practices will make your time in school so much more enjoyable and rewarding. Let's hear from your fellow students about their experiences with high impact learning. So in the summer of 2023, I was able to study abroad in Florence, Italy. We did street photography. So since I'm a photography major, it made sense that I went on it, but I think taking that big risk really did help me in the long run of just making better art, looking at art differently, just learning in a different environment, still with people I knew, but still out of my comfort zone. So I think that really pushed me, and I would never trade that experience for anything else. I got involved with the International Studies program kind of later in my school career. So I was into my junior year, going into my senior year. I was involved with the study abroad in Oaxaca, which was an anthropology and Spanish program. So Spanish was my minor kind of cheating because I'm already fluent in Spanish. But, you know, really going down to Mexico and studying Spanish at an academic level with Mexican teachers, you know, people that lived in Mexico, you know, even though I'm from there, it really helped build that sense of identity that I felt that I didn't really carry through, you know, being born in the United States and living here all my life. Undergraduate research, I was able to get in over the summer. It helped me get hands on skills and work with the team. And then at the end, I was able to build a poster for a conference, an undergraduate research conference. These are all things I was able to put on my resume. Under research experience, more lab skills, which helped me build my resume. If you're looking to explore some exciting and impactful learning experiences, don't hesitate to reach out to your academic advisor or faculty members in your major. They'll be happy to point you in the right direction. Thanks for watching, and be sure to visit Learning.IU.edu for more tips on enhancing your IU experience.

When you choose classes that include or are based on these high impact learning experiences, you ensure you gain some of the Gallup Six experiences as you go through college. Not sure which classes will count? Talk to your academic advisor or to faculty members in your major. They can steer you in the right direction. Students in your major who are ahead of you in school or who are serving as tutors or peer mentors may also know about good opportunities because they participated in them.

Resources and opportunities

Need to pick up a particular set of skills? Discovered something you enjoy and want to learn more? IU has all sorts of self-paced, online, non-graded training that you can take advantage of to better hone your academic, life and career skills. Most are offered free of charge so dive in and find out what your options are!

Expand courses & IT Training

Expand is IU’s platform for delivering online non-credit and professional development coursework. You access courses through Canvas and most are offered free of charge. All you need to do is log-in and search using keywords to find available courses. Try searching using the following keywords: career skills, research posters, overseas study, mentoring, study skills. You can also find Career EDGE, Cornell Notes, Mind Over Chatter, Learning with Integrity, and the Student Guide to IU eTexts here. If you’re an online student, search for online as your keyword to find courses like the Student Online Toolkit, IU Online Test Drive, and Online Student Onboarding.

Visit Expand

UITS also offers self-paced training on their IT Training website. Some of these courses are also offered through an Expand version, but you can access the content at this site without registering through Expand. Often, there is a video of the training and exercise files to download so you can walk through the steps with the instructor. These courses focus on guiding users through getting started with common software packages used at IU (Kaltura, Zoom, Canvas, Microsoft products, Google products, Adobe products, and more).

Check out IT Training's self-paced courses

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning is an online, self-paced, non-graded learning platform that offers over 15,000 video courses to help you increase your technology, creative, and business skills. This would be a great way to augment your academic studies by adding a focused career skill to your repertoire. Some of your professors may even have you complete one of these video courses as part of the work for their class, so it is integrated into Canvas.

Courses cover topics such as time management, study strategies, or critical thinking; quick tips and training for common software packages like Excel, Powerpoint or Photoshop; as well as more typical training courses such as those for coding languages and statistical techniques.

Normally a monthly, paid subscription-based service, LinkedIn Learning is being offered to IU students for no extra cost. Check your options out by going into LinkedIn Learning and typing in a keyword in the search bar. You may be surprised by what you find!

Check out LinkedIn Learning