Abstract

Virtual learning is challenging with generic resources in web applications which go through different updates frequently.  While self-study involves short term intrinsic motivation fueled by passion for a topic or language, college education comes with binding realistic goals like academic degree or job. Either the learner keeps switching from one app to another till he finds the suitable ones or poorly performs with a school assigned e-learning app where assignments need to be submitted before getting well acquainted with the software. Learners become demotivated to use these apps or software again. Despite providing enough resources to gain proficiency in a particular area, user retention decreases for certain apps and the struggle for academic recognition of eLearning increases. Instead, both employers and learners trust institutional accreditation for quality assurance which involves massive tuition fees and lacks flexible learning.  To ensure recurring uses of apps and acknowledgement of learner’s hard work, they need to focus on the entire journey by experiential learning (Kolb,1984). App developers can also help the learners with this process. Instead of depending exclusively on beta testing before a release or upgrade of the system, their existing customer satisfaction survey questions can be more detailed and improved by applying experiential learning theory (Kolb,1984) with small incentives for participation. On the other hand, learner engagement and performance is improved by revisiting the entire process of learning. So, a metacognitive reflection which involves self-monitoring and self-evaluating (Oxford,1990) is triggered. App users can identify the mistakes they made and evaluate the learning experience measuring with past and present performance.  Learners tend to skip that in most cases. So, this paper presentation will focus on the application of experiential learning for improving apps by activating metacognitive reflection in learners and thus enhance learner autonomy (Holec, 1981).