L7 1 5

=Learning activities and tasks are placed within an authentic context for student learning. =

Evidence
Student learning success is significantly affected by the creation of an e-learning environment that provides active engagement in experiential contexts. This requires teachers to clearly understand programme outcomes, teaching approach, students’ motivation and learning styles, all of which depends on diligent planning. Also, students need to be able to link their learning to their life experiences. Technology plays a significant role in this and requires that the online teaching/learning environment undergo a reconstruction of student and teacher roles, relationships and strategies – students need to become active players in their own learning in regard to learning approach and intellectual challenges (Grabinger and Dunlap, 2000).

Teachers need to be conversant with current research and theory and familiar with the complexities of human interactions with ICT, so that as users they are not detached from students. Teachers and learners need to be cognisant of their embodiment in technology relations that integrates knowing acting and being. Such embodied knowing opens understandings of the mind-body/machine nexus (Dall’Alba and Barnacle, 2005).

Twenty years later, Chickering and Ehrmann’s (1996) ‘principle’ of active learning techniques in a technological context rehearses much of Chickering’s original thinking. In articulating Principle Three Good Practice Uses Active Learning Techniques, they emphasise that learning is not passive. Rather, students must be actively engaged in vocalising and writing about their learning, integrate past experiences, and apply it to their daily lives: ‘They must make what they learn part of themselves’ (p. 4).

Resources
Evidence of capability in this practice is seen through course and programme designs that provide students with authentic and personally relevant contexts for their learning. E-learning technologies and pedagogies should be flexibly designed so as to allow incorporation of student experience and knowledge.