The 5th Cypriot Post Graduate School's Conference

This learning activity was designed by P. N. G. at Foreign Languages and English Preparatory School at Eastern Mediterranean University in 2019-2020 Spring semester as part of in service teacher training program on authentic learning. Ms. G. used the nine principles of authentic learning as proposed by Jan Herrington and Ron Oliver (2010) in their book entitled “A guide to authentic E-learning” to design the activity. The characteristics of these nine elements and their application to this learning activity are stated below.

How each of the characteristics of authentic activities were applied and used throughout the activity:

1. Authentic context that reflects the way the knowledge will be used in the real life: Scenario to students:

You are a potential academic presenter for your department and EMU at the 5th Cypriot Conference for Post Graduate Schools to be held at EMU; you will be working with other EMU graduate students responsible for preparing an academic presentation and producing various promotional materials related to your departmental topic that should be relevant and informative to the coming audiences from various department and across the island. Each presenter will prepare their own academic presentation and advertising material, but you will work as team since you will be representing EMU in the 5^th Cypriot Post Graduate Schools Conference.

2. Authentic Activities:

a. Real world Relevance: In this activity students understand that they were required to plan, organize, advertise and produce an academic presentation accompanied with other products such as outlines, posters, videos, and QR Codes. Students although learners knew they were required to present an actual presentation in front of a real live audience where they needed to answer unexpected questions since the audience would be made up of post grad students from the class and from outside of the class.

b. Ill-defined, requiring students to define the tasks and subtasks needed to complete the activity. Students needed to define the tasks and sub-tasks to complete the activity over a sustained period of time: The learning environment and the task required learners to go through ill-defined stages that were laid out in a sequential manner by the instructor. Students were required to prepared outlines, posters, add voice/video QRCs, post them in their departments, prepare PowerPoint slides, invite other students, deliver a presentation and video the sessions as if at a conference. The sequential manner was done to reduce the anxiety level, but this did not reduce the complexity or difficulty level of the activity to reach a conclusion. Because of its ill-defined and complex nature, learners needed to spend more mental and interactional effort over a sustained period of time (Week 8 – week 13) they had to decide on what attention getting-openers they would use or how they would end their presentations, what message did they want to give their audience and decide how to use signpost - spoken English in an academic setting. These were the learners’ responsibility. Students were on their own as to how they would navigate the websites that would best suit their own learning style for presenting. They also had to make choices over what tools they would need to use in order to create their promotional materials. Thus students were giving a non-defining activity which only they could fulfil as this had to do with their departments and their individual personalities and characters as learners. So they needed to find appropriate tools to produce and give an academic presentation that reflected them.

b. Producing polished products was seen as valuable for it moved away from classroom activity. Students’ preparation involved many steps that could not be done in class: Writing outlines, preparing posters, voice/video invitations. There were two instances when in-class tasks were seen as necessary to guide students before students completed their polished product. The first was peer feedback on their posters and recorded videos and the second was to familiarize students with how they will be assessed, using the assessment criteria to grade a mock presentation by the supervisor. The latter was seen as an important practise before their actual academic presentations to make changes and to fine-tune their own presentation PowerPoint slides, and language. Thus in this way, the activity appears to move away from school-type presentation.

c. Having an open-ended activity allowed for competing solutions and a diversity of outcomes: The activity was open-ended allowing for variety of outcomes. By allowing students the freedom and the opportunity to use any language structure, students were able to acquire new structures to write their outlines and learn academic conventions for giving an academic presentation - attention-getting openers, overviews, signposts, and final messages in their outlines and presentations. It was clear that this opened ended activity was a key factor in achieving authentic outcomes, which motivated students to provide engaging academic presentations to attract the attention of the authentic audiences.

c. Leading beyond domain–and skill–specific outcomes: The product-oriented nature of the authentic activity led to the creation of products that comprised of real communication and that focused on multiple skills. The learning activity allowed students to produce not only their own presentations, but allowed them to be involved in other students presentations which captured real communication and incorporated reading, writing, speaking and listening skills, along with the development of perhaps grammar structures not covered in class and vocabulary.

d. Providing the opportunity for students to examine the task from different perspectives, using a variety of resources: The major perspectives while completing the activity was to allow students to present content knowledge: posters, videos, outlines PowerPoint slides and actual presentations. To do this, students needed to make certain choices such as what to include, leave out, what academic conventions to use that suited their presentations, how the content needed to be presented and what spoken language needed to be used in an academic setting: colloquial or slang. The focus was also on the audience – outside of the class, students needed to prepare for unexpected questions, and focus on process – when will each component be completed. Also students needed while working on their own presentation, they also had to collaborate and give each other constructive feedback on content and products produced as these would be seen by others not just students in the class. Each of these components needed to be completed in order for the activity to be accomplished. This allowed students not only the opportunity to develop target knowledge and experience, but also their mediation skills which in turn develops their higher order thinking skills.

3. Access to expert performance and the modelling of process:

Students were provided with useful professional material and access to a performance by their supervisor/instructor on how a live presentation should be given. Moreover, students were provided with websites on giving presentations, a model presentation poster with an invitation QR code prepared by the supervisor/instructor. These materials were to enable students to analyse and look at features that made-up a poster, an outline format and Power Point slides. For example, these components were provided to help students to analyse and observe various characteristics involved in putting together a live academic presentation - attention-getting openers, spoken language versus written language, font-sizes, colour schemes for PowerPoint slides and posters, language for greeting audiences, timing. All these features enabled students to learn and construct their own learning needs and decide what they want to include. In addition, students also get to witness how the assessment criterion is used by assessing their supervisor/ instructor giving a live presentation. Whereby students see how their presentation performance will be assessed during the selection process.

4. Multiple roles and perspectives:

Students had many roles while completing this activity. They were potential presenters who had to prepare their own presentations; they were advertisers designing their own promotional material to attract audiences from outside of the class. And then they were asked to be assessors assessing their instructor/supervisor and peers using the marking criterion that would be used to assess them during the selection presentation process. And finally, as members of a group they also needed to provide constructive feedback to each other to improve their academic presentations as well as their own.

5. Support collaborative construction of knowledge:

This was established as it was seen as significant part to facilitate learning. Students were grouped to develop their negotiation skills by helping each other to further develop their skills in mediation, problem solving – computer skills, and language skills. The students’ preferred discussion platform was WhatsApp. This was where students shared their concerns regarding the activity such as: outline planning, and how to start a presentation, where to find useful information about attention-getting openers, how videos are made, which webpages to find useful language for presentations. These issues were all discussed throughout each task process. The supervisor/instructor followed the discussions on WhatsApp to provide scaffolding to students in critical situations to make sure that they constructed good knowledge to achieve their goals.

6. Promote reflection to enable abstractions to be formed:

Reflection could have been more, but when it was implemented in class while viewing students’ posters with QR codes; it provided students with very meaningful discussion that boosted their learning experiences. Moreover, students had opportunities at different stages to reflect on the learning (e.g., feedback on academic outlines), problem solving (e.g., while designing and producing their posters, PowerPoint slides, QR code video invitations). Students shared their learning strategies from outside the class during class time on WhatsApp. Students were asked by the supervisor/ instructor in class to reflect on their experiences of preparing the activity, students talked about scheduling times to meet and discussed the processes that they employed to complete tasks.

7. Promote articulation to enable tacit knowledge to be explicit:

The real-world activity maintained a communicative purpose and provided opportunities to students to learn new structures in context—while at the same time practising existing knowledge. This activity provided them with communication skills through preparing various products, while producing them and thus acquiring new language structures, not taught in class such as: I would like to invite you to,,,. Do you have any questions? Can someone help me with the poster video? Any suggestions where I can find….? And do we use passive or active voice in presentations?

8. Providing coaching and scaffolding by the teacher at critical times:

The coaching and scaffolding method was used by the instructor to help the students. The instructor provided students with relevant material necessary to help them instead of giving direct instruction. For example, in week 8 all material related to the activity was posted on Edmodo with a timeline. Students had two weeks to read and look at all the materials posted on Edmodo and select a topic to present. It was this platform comment box and in class that reflection time was expected to be used by the instructor to provide guidance to the students with queries. But instead the WhatsApp became the preferred choice and in-class. For instance, students asked for help with videos or how to prepare their outlines, the instructor provided necessary assistance with where to look – on Edmodo, but other students shared their ideas on WhatsApp.

9. Provide for authentic assessment of learning within the tasks:

Students’ performance was assessed using the final product. Outline, and academic presentation – with visual data. Thus students were assessed on speaking, preparing and presenting academic presentation using power-point; by giving a well-organized and developed academic informative presentation using appropriate language; taking part in question and answer discussions during presentation. The activity provided students with opportunities to use the target language in context. What’s more, the assessment provided students with opportunities to measure what good looked like and what they could do with the target language during practice and on the actual presentation day. Hence, students were able to reflect on their language skills by referring to the Presentation Criteria.

10. Additional principle: Providing motivational factors:

Motivation was achieved through posing a challenge that was tied to a goal:

The major task and challenge was to prepare an academic presentation that they will deliver in the selection process to represent their department and EMU in the 5^th Cypriot Post Graduate Schools Conference. They had to prepare for the selection conference individually, but also work as a team to get selected to represent EMU. To do this, they had to prepare presentations that would be considered significant and relevant to their department and that would appeal to audiences from different faculties and institutions.

The subtasks were intended to be informative to the audiences of issues discussed in post graduate schools and to create awareness about relevant academic issues discussed in different faculties, for example, solar planes to reduce fossil fuel in poor countries, using AI to connect to the human brain to help handicapped people, and the devastating effects of globalization, etc.

Giving student’s real world tasks (rather than "just do an academic presentation followed by peer questions”) with authentic roles, students became potential conference presenters representing their department and EMU. To ensure that the final product is polished, students worked together to produce posters, outlines and used appropriate academic language to deliver their presentations. This notion of “as if” encouraged and motivated them to go through the activity, for it challenged them, but not to the extent that they could not achieve the tasks. The students used their background knowledge and expertise in their subjects to produce polished products.

Working together to prepared posters, videos, PowerPoint slides and outlines was challenging to some students but working as a group they shared their knowledge and expertise that did not go beyond some students’ perceived capacities; and thus motivated them. This is evident in the WhatsApp’s chats while completing the tasks.

Having students involved in finding important and relevant topics - a problem solving process which is also seen as social, played a significant part in making the activity an authentic problem with authentic audiences. Furthermore, having the posters displayed in their departments and some on Facebook were considered as other motivational aspects of the activity.

This activity also provided ownership of the problem and the process to be solved by the students’. Self-efficacy appeared to be reflected in the confidence students showed and in their ability to exert control over their own motivation to complete the assigned activity.

Students were given freedom and control over the activity; and they decided upon the topics. The process of how, where to gather and brainstorm ideas to complete the activity was their own to make. This was all done outside of the classroom. Reflection and the actual presentations were conducted in the class and were educational for all who attended the mock presentation, class reflections and actual presentations.

Publishing their posters and inviting other post graduate students from their departments and other students, provided motivation in terms of developing more convincing informative presentations.