Authenticity

What makes a case design authentic? Multi-media options dramatically expand the options for increasing how closely the learning environment imitates the real world. But HOW we choose to improve authenticity should probably depend more on our instructional objectives than on the technology available to us...

Authenticity is a different parameter than fidelity, which is often used in nursing and medical literature on cases, and can be explored using the link below.

Here we will consider the authenticity of the learning activity: how well does it correspond to the learning objective or to the clinical task it is trying to emulate?

• If my goal is to improve students' observational skills, I need to give them something to observe.
• If I want them to be able to solve problems, they need a real-world problem in front of them.
• If I want to improve their analytic abilities, the problem could involve multiple or competing factors to consider and prioritize.

Check out the links below to explore principles and samples of authentic case building: