I was very excited to read this week's articles on authentic learning, as it seems to not only be a trend in education and instructional design but has had, in my experience, a significant impact on designing e-learning in higher education. Authentic learning, or learning that moves from more traditional "rote learning" methods to an active participation of knowledge transference and cognitive processing, seems like the answer to intrinsic passivity in online learning, and I found Herrington's article on authentic e-learning in higher education struck many familiar chords. When I was participating in developing instructional design during the initial stages of COVID quarantining, it quickly became apparent that many faculty had created an "online" course by simply transferring their in-person curriculum to a learning management system. Some course pages consisted of disorganized dumps of scholarly articles to read, and some courses had no organization other than the syllabus. In continuing conversations on developing both standardization and more integration of active learning, it became clear that the answer to developing authentic learning in an online environment wasn't really happening. Herrington hit on exactly what some of our conversations had devolved into: what, exactly, is authentic learning? How can it be developed for a virtual course without clear, research-based guidelines? In Herrington's other article, An Instructional Design Framework for Authentic Learning Environments, he and his co-author attempted to provide such guidelines, though the instruction is complex and not easily applied. It always struck me as fascinating that in an environment like higher education, where research is an critical part of faculty roles, the mechanisms behind developing virtual coursework that engages authentic learning isn't given as much focus. Perhaps, given the upward trend in instructional designer careers, this will continue to move towards the forefront of conversations on authentic learning.
susinc
Hi Susinc,
Your introduction is very interesting. I didn't experience the first online course when pandemic started. When I enrolled in this Fall semester, my two online courses have shown clear instruction content and requirement and related materials. It seems that all tasks are progressing in an orderly manner. I am also enjoying the online courses of this semester. Hence, I don't image the experience of early online course that you encountered during the pandemic. But I think that it is also a good experience for your learning and future work of Instructional design. At the same time, I think that the thinking about authentic learning will keep going because there is different context in different period.
Xiaojiao Sun