Keep it real: The benefits of authentic tasks in contemporary learning environments

This chapter from Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology responds to the failure of engaging learners when the world of education was catapulted nearly overnight into online remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting learning losses have raised awareness of the need for more evidence-based practices. The design-principles introduced in this chapter are core to providing learner-centered experiences, and the implication for design go beyond pandemic recovery. Learning experiences that connect academic knowledge with real-world and learner-relevant issues are essential for engaging students and for deepening learning. The authors propose an expanded model of authentic learning that includes principles like learner agency, learner choice, and learner relevance. They illustrate these principles through a case study involving the redesign of a health science course, showcasing how authentic learning tasks can be implemented in practice. Readers can follow the transformation of a course that scored extremely low in active learning to a course that affords learners multiple lines of inquiry into an academically complex task. The authentic learning task not only deepens the learning of subject matter content, it fosters the cognitive, social, and emotional capabilities of learners and provides them with the opportunity for social connection which develops a belonging mindset.

Why is it important?

Authentic learning experiences  are important because they promise to take personalized learning to the highest levels of learning. Personalized learning is too often conceived as customizing the learning path or learning pace for learners through the application of adaptive technology, but these automated approaches only address lower-level outcomes. Authentic learning experiences foster higher-level outcomes, deepen learning transfer and increase motivation and engagement by making curriculum real-world and learner-relevant.

Preparing learners to succeed in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) modern world requires learning experiences that are equally complex, real-world and learner relevant. When aiming to develop the skills for a changing world, then authentic learning experiences (as defined by the design principles) are needed.

Perspectives

This chapter connects learning sciences research and instructional design practice via a set of design principles. By doing so, it makes an argument that these two fields of scholarship (learning sciences and instructional design) belong together as they have a hand-in-glove relationship. Teaching and learning in the 21st century have become one design science.

Instructional designers for which this textbook is written play a tremendous role in the current transformation towards a more learner-centered, personalized, and competency-based approach. The creativity of designers to apply the design principles in local contexts and their ability to support instructors as they endeavor to teach in new ways are key to the success of the needed transformation.

reDesignED applies this important research to the fullest extent possible.