FLO tips - Authentic and active learning for deep learning

Students will easily engage in a topic when their learning is designed to be active and an authentic reflection of real-life tasks in their chosen field. Ensuring your teaching strategies include authentic and active learning and assessment will help to:

Keep students engaged, motivated and learning at a deeper level
Provide them with confidence that they are developing skills and knowledge relevant to current professional or industry standards and practices
Create a dynamic and student-centred learning experience
Contribute to meeting Flinders principles for learning and teaching

What is authentic learning?

Authentic tasks:

address real-world problems and contexts
provide realistic interactions from the perspective of the learner
feel human and personal

Authentic learning is contextualised to a real-world work, industry or professional environment, or appropriate generic community environments. Authentic tasks allow students to apply knowledge and skills they are learning, to address complex, ill-structured problems that mirror the types of problems they will face in their working lives. Just as the learning process is made more authentic, applied and active, assessment follows the same approach.

What is active learning?

Active tasks:

support the learner to participate in the learning process
provide iterative feedback

Active learning requires the student to do something meaningful with this information, deepening understanding. There are considerable advantages to creating active learning that involves collaboration and is well-scaffolded to support the development of confidence and competence.

Designing authentic and active FLO experiences

What do your students need to do and why are they doing it? Design your online activities around learning outcomes, using active strategies. If you need help with translating face to face activities into online activities, talk to your Learning Design team.

Tip 1: Find the right balance

Collaborative and social learning has been shown to be effective for deep learning. However, not all students want to work collaboratively or continuously be involved in discussions. It is important to find a balance between collaborative group activities, and individual activities. provide group work to meet learning outcomes around team-work and collaboration, but also make sure individual work is available.

Tip 2: Ideas for authentic and active learning activities

Which activities approximate real-world procedures or digital literacies? What digital resources do students need to create as evidence of their progress in knowledge and skills?

The best activity type will depend on the unique needs of your students. Here are some ideas and examples for active and authentic learning activities.

Valuing prior knowledge and experience

Use meaningful and purposely designed asynchronous discussion questions to engage students - e.g. ask students to share an appropriate experience related to the topic as part of their first discussion forum post.
Use low-stakes embedded quizzes so that students can self-assess their own starting point or to gauge prior knowledge.
Provide automated answers and/or model answers in self-paced quizzes to allow students to check their own knowledge.

Establishing an authentic context

Link activities and assessments to what will be expected in the professional or industrial context for the topic, or to generic life situations
Ensure you have provided links to relevant industry or professional bodies and newsletters, and aim to include guest speakers from industry or the relevant field in parts of your topic
Refer to current and relatable examples (e.g. link to current events, popular media)

Using an authentic and active narrative

Use a conversational tone, and friendly reminders/alerts within your topic modules and pages (use audio or video as alternatives to text at least a few times)
Inclusive language – personalise and value uniqueness of the cohort together
Encourage students to share audio and video responses
Encouraging learning journals, content collation, reflection (ePortfolio is great for this)
Create meaningful module names - your FLO site starts life as a weekly format, but you can rename modules into themes, add additional modules or add labels with themes.

Focus on skills development

Are there digital technology skills that students need to learn? Have them find and share digital resources
Use Self and Peer Assessment to mimic journal submission and editorial process, get them to use audio/video to share information for multiple audiences and digital platforms
Schedule online 1-1 and group sessions and run these by sharing productivity tools available within Flinders

Conversation and discussion

Use an encouraging voice – post updates and messages to students using video or audio, in the discussion forums, via announcements and within a module or page.
Name discussion forums meaningfully or imaginatively to suggest its intended use e.g. an informal discussion forum could be called ‘Ask a Philosopher!’
Define communication spaces for formal responses (assessed) and informal (conversation and questions)
Mimic popular discussion platforms by using post ratings and encouraging multimedia submissions, if appropriate to the task
Use polling for instant feedback on student responses and understanding

Encourage collaborative creating

Encourage students to meet with each other in their group spaces and (for e.g.) view a resource together: see Staff Canvas Support link below for examples of tools and spaces for group activities
Allow students to self-select into groups to mimic team-work real-world working groups to organise working together
Have students complete a collaborative authoring task for public sharing, replicating real-world process such as editorials, news, opinion, using multimedia to present information in an engaging and adaptive way
Ensure a culturally inclusive process and environment

Design iterative feedback

Provide scaffolded learning using automatic feedback in practise quizzes that build on each other
Ensure feedback via peers and teachers, sharing in discussions
Use a live quiz or poll during a live session, adapt your approach as you go

Supporting resources

Support for teachers

Self-paced workshop on Authentic, experiential and active learning - available via iEnrol
For guidance on all aspects of Good Practice around authentic and active learning, check out the section on Learning and Teaching Principles on the Good Practice Guide and Tip Sheets site
See also Graduate qualities and our Work-integrated Learning approaches.
Find help using relevant Canvas tools for authentic and active learning in Staff Flo Support
To find peers who are also interested in sharing FLO tips on authentic and active learning, join the Flinders Community of Practice