Guide Students to More Engagement in Online Instruction

If students do not find the content of the course relevant to their own lives, they may see little value in mastering the content and may fail to engage in the behaviors required for deep learning. One pedagogical approach to increase motivation and relevancy is to design courses and activities with an Authentic Learning approach. This approach to instruction describes learning activities that are either carried out in real-world contexts or have a high transfer to a real-world setting. Authentic learning activities should have both personal and cultural relevance (Stein, Isaacs, & Andrews, 2004). Personal relevance means that learners should be able to connect the new information they are learning to their lives outside of the classroom and their theories about how the world works. Cultural relevance refers to the culture of the academic discipline—authentic learning tasks should reflect “the ordinary practices of th[at] culture” (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1988, p. 34). In other words, authentic learning tasks teach students how to think like a member of their discipline (Meyers & Nulty, 2009).

 

Students are more motivated to engage with learning material and will participate in class when:

• They see value in the course material, learning objectives (outcome)s, and activities that they can relate to their own lives.
• The course objectives or learning outcomes align with students' interests and goals (academic, career, and social).

 

Harrington’s 9 Elements of Authentic Learning

1. Provide authentic contexts that reflect the way the knowledge will be used in real life.
2. Provide authentic tasks and activities.
3. Provide access to expert performances and the modeling of processes.
4. Provide multiple roles and perspectives.
5. Support collaborative construction of knowledge.
6. Promote reflection to enable abstractions to be formed.
7. Promote articulation to enable tacit knowledge to be made explicit.
8. Provide coaching and scaffolding by the teacher at critical times.
9. Provide for authentic assessment of learning within the tasks.