Authentically enhancing the learning and development environment

Constructivism is increasingly being included into higher education curriculum design. The goal is simple: to enhance the learning experiences, the learned outcomes, and the graduate capabilities of students. However, the inclusion or addition of constructivist learning models and methods into curricula can occur in a non-holistic, inefficient or piecemeal manner. There exists an increasing demand from stakeholders in higher education course curricula that they produce graduates with a greater level of authenticity in their competency and capability and to be better able to cope with change, complexity and uncertainty as professional practitioners. Can a more effective learning and development environment where active learning is observable and assessable be created using a blend of constructivist learning and instructivist/objectivist learning philosophies, models, methods, and techniques? Can the authenticity and practice proximity be quantitatively assessed for such a learning and development environment in order to better enable the design, implementation, and ongoing dynamic optimisation of more authentic course curricula? To research this, a learning and development environment inclusive of constructivist experiential learning methods and traditional instructivist/objectivist learning methods was trialled in 2016 within a core undergraduate project management unit. Observations and results from the initial trial indicate that the proposed learning and development environment model can be successfully implemented and achieve improved learning outcomes. A conceptual quantitative method seeking to determine the relative combined proportion of task authenticity and practice proximity was also developed.