By: CJ
My apologises to Dr Mandernach, but statements like "integrates active learning environments with authentic learning tasks" - what do these words really mean? At the moment, all I find is a focus on having students write on a discussion board. Then judging students as active or not on the basis of the comments they make on other students' posts. I am trying to look for "authentic learning tasks" - or what I think this actually means in terms of not just comment after comment on a discussion board, but in students creating a plan, carrying out a self-assessment, working their way through a decision maze, evaluating a technology. Yet I am being told that the only thing that counts is quality and quantity of posts on a discussion board as the metric of a successful online learning community.