Thomas C. Reeves

Regardless of whether one thinks of today’s higher education students as “digital natives” or members of “Generation Me,” it is obvious that traditional

The use of authentic activities within online learning environments has been shown to have many benefits for learners in online units and courses. There has been renewed interest in the role of student activities within course units, as constructivist philosophy and advances in technology impact on educational design and practice. Courses based on these principles have been used successfully across a wide variety of discipline areas. In spite of the growing evidence of the success of authentic learning environments, they are not without their problems. In this paper we discuss patterns of engagement that have emerged from our own research on authentic learning tasks, in particular, the initial reluctance to willingly immerse in learning scenarios that some students experience, and the need for the suspension of disbelief before engaging in the task. The paper proposes ten characteristics of authentic activities, based on educational theory and research, which have been used as criteria for the selection of existing online units or courses for in depth investigation. The paper includes a short review of the literature, a description of the research and some preliminary findings and identification of issues related to the necessity for students to willingly suspend disbelief in order to fully engage in learning scenarios based on authentic tasks.

This article describes the design, evaluation, and results of an innovative undergraduate engineering course at the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA). The course, ENGR 110 — Introduction to Engineering, is a problem‐based learning environment in which freshmen students work in teams to solve problems integral to a “mission to Mars”, that is, getting to Mars, constructing a research site on Mars, and developing a renewable power source there. In addition to traditional knowledge and skill objectives, the course focuses on “higher order” outcomes such as: framing and resolving ill‐defined problems; communicating via multiple media; exhibiting intellectual curiosity; and developing a rich conceptualisation of engineering. The course is described in terms of a set of pedagogical dimensions for problem‐based learning environments. Several cognitive assessment methods were used to assess student achievement and evaluate the effectiveness of the course. Results included statistically and educationally significant differences in “problem‐solving” between two classes of ENGR 110 students and two control classes of sophomore engineering students.