Authentic Learning is an approach where students learn through engaging in real-world problems and projects. This allows the students to apply their prior learning and develop new understanding in practical ways that are contextualised to their professional context. Authentic Learning encourages students to develop an understanding of the issues and processes that are used in professional contexts and allows them to use their knowledge and skills to come up with, potentially novel, solutions to problems they may eventually face in the workplace.
Authentic Learning works well for both individual and group learning activities, and is particularly suited to cross-disciplinary groups as these bring new perspectives and ideas into the groups and also better reflect the diverse teams that students are likely to work in after graduation. It is also most suited to open-ended learning tasks that don't have a single 'correct' answer, and so encourage students to come up with creative solutions and experiment with different knowledge and processes, when appropriate.
