With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI), the
effectiveness of instructional pedagogies for students in higher education
needs to be reassessed to make sure they learn authentically—a pedagogical
approach of enabling students to learn and acquire knowledge meaningfully
within the context of real-world problems relevant to their lives. To achieve
this, instructors must redesign their courses to deliver content in ways that
encourage participation and engagement within an AI-driven community-of-inquiry
type of learning environment. This article proposes a theoretical framework for
integrating gen-AI into the design and delivery of courses to promote authentic
learning in a gen-AI-driven context by reorganizing the student experience
along three axes. The first axis is to create learning activities that are
context, task, impact, and value authentic. The second axis is to reconfigure
the roles of students and instructors, as well as the latter’s pedagogies in
ways that promote authentic participation and engagement that develop the
student’s sense of self-efficacy, emotional engagement, belongingness, and
overall well-being. The third axis is fostering a community-of-inquiry type of
learning environment, one that is characterized by cognitive presence, social
presence, and teaching presence, these being the qualities that facilitate
student engagement and participation that lead to authentic learning.
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