Course Design for Authentic Learning
|
Author: Laura Rosenzweig Publication date: November 13, 2017 Revision date: December 6, 2017 For a print-friendly version, click here |
The Opportunity
How can we teach students to be authentic learners?
So often, teaching in higher education is defined by the delivery of content. The professor, as expert, delivers content to students in the form of lectures and readings. “Learning,” therefore, is defined as the student's ability to demonstrate understanding of that content. Within this paradigm, learning can be quite a passive, externally-driven experience. While this approach to teaching might produce students who have content knowledge, it does not necessarily produce "authentic learners," learners who know how to ask their own questions, make connections, and think critically.
The Example
Cultivating authentic learning was a central objective for Professor Erin Murphy of UC Berkeley's School of Education. In her Education in a Global World course (EDUC W142) Professor Murphy created a course design that guided students through a process of exploration, collaboration and reflection. Each week, students were introduced to the topic and concepts through readings and videos, Instead of responding to instructor-generated prompts to demonstrate their individual learning, students were required to participate in weekly, online study groups in which they shared their understanding with others to produce a group project.
The screencast below provides a short tour of the structure of Professor Murphy's online course. Take note of the sequence of learning activities, and in particular, the use of a special suite of collaboration tools that facilitate authentic learning.
Impact
Course design that targets authentic learning may have the following impact on student learning:
1. Students practice making connections among and between concepts
2. Students gain experience (1) asking their own research questions and (2) research the answers.
3. Students construct their own meaning and understanding from information provided.
Keep in Mind
Designing a course to cultivate authentic learning in an online course requires
(1) a course design that combines independent, asynchronous study with live, online discussions among students. This means that the course should be offered with specific live section meeting times to ensure that students block off an hour a week for their group discussion meetings.
(2) Faculty commitment to the constructivist process by participating actively with students in the course and training and coaching TAs to be facilitators of student learning. Faculty, therefore, should expect to be involved with both their TAs and their students to realize the process objective of cultivating authentic learning skills in their students.
Mechanics
For collaboration among students the following applications lend themselves to various types of constructivist activity:
Canvas Tools
1. The "Group" feature in Canvas: Has several tools that students can use to collect and share information
2. The "Collaboration" feature in Canvas: Makes it easy for students working in groups to collaborate on a text document in gDocs.
Third-Party Apps
1. Zoom (licensed by all UC campuses) : The screen sharing feature in Zoom allows students to work together on a document, regardless of the application.
2. Hypothes.is (free and for-fee versions) : Document annotation platform that allows groups of students to annotate the same document and discuss key points associated with their annotations.
3. Suite-C (free to UC campuses): Collaboration platform that allows students to collect resources (articles, images, videos and links) to build a class library for any given topic or question. Whiteboard tool then allows students to collect various assets from the library to design a visual concept map of the question or concept at hand
4. BoardThing (free and for-fee versions): Brainstorming platform that uses the metaphor of “post it notes” to facilitate group brainstorming, concept mapping or outlining.