Authentic activities rule OK!

I attended our institutional Annual Learning and Teaching Conference last week and it was interesting to see a variety of authentic formative and summative assessment activities. In an attempt to move away from just focusing on essays and final reports lecturers are considering different ways students might communicate in the real world, both verbally and in writing, and have tried to address this by integrating authentic assessment practices. Here are some of the examples presented:

• Psychology: submitting articles to a trade magazine; writing a journal digest; organising a student conference with student presentations
• Sociology: constructing a book proposal and submitting to a publisher 
• Art & Design: contributing content to an open web site & sharing under a creative commons license 

These examples appeared to illustrate, Meyers and McNulty's 2009, 5 curriculum design principles

To maximise the quality of student learning outcomes, we, as academics, need to

develop courses in ways that provide students with teaching and learning materials,

tasks and experiences which: 

(1) are authentic, real-world and relevant;

(2) are constructive, sequential and interlinked;

(3) require students to use and engage with progressively higher order cognitive

processes;

(4) are all aligned with each other and the desired learning outcomes; and

(5) provide challenge, interest and motivation to learn (Meyers

 and Nulty, 2009 p. 566)

- which they say were guided by Biggs 3 Presage-Process-Product, 3P, model which, was developed to express the interactions between lecturers and students from the point of view of the expectations that both would have of the teaching and learning process:

http://inclusive-teaching.wikispaces.com/Biggs's+work+1 

As on e-learning developer I think these guiding principles are particularly apt within an online environment where it is so easy to take a transmissional approach to learning and teaching and deliver students with masses of content, colleauges sometimes forget that activities that are undertaken in a face-to-face environment could be transferred to online, in particular the excellent examples listed above.  


References

Noel M. Meyers & Duncan D. Nulty (2009): How to use (five) curriculum design
principles to align authentic learning environments, assessment, students’ approaches to thinking and learning outcomes, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 34:5, 565-577
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02602930802226502

Inclusive Teaching Wiki http://inclusive-teaching.wikispaces.com/