Over the past few decades there has been a substantial swing among higher education practitioners towards a more constructivist approach to learning. Nevertheless, it is still evident that many instructivist models are widely used in both classroom and online learning environments. A key challenge for educators is linking learner needs, pedagogy…

Professional learning is an important process in enabling teachers to update their pedagogical knowledge and practices. The use of online technologies to support professional learning has a number of benefits in terms of flexibility and scalability. However, it is not clear how well the approach impacts on teachers' classroom practices. This…

The affordances of online learning technologies have enabled more widespread development of learning environments that facilitate the exploration and solving of complex and realistic problems. In this paper, we describe the design of a real world geography problem, embedded within a web environment that is facilitated by an onsite excursion for…

Influenced by constructivist educational theory and advances in technology, there is increasing interest in authentic activities as a basis for learning in both face-to-face and Web-based courses. Whereas traditionally, real-world activities have primarily served as vehicles for practice of skills or processes that are taught using traditional…

Authentic learning designs have been explored for some time now and have frequently been shown to provide learning settings that provide many meaningful contexts for learning. These meaningful contexts provide not only encouragement for students to learn but also a raft of learning enhancements including higher-order learning and forms of learning…