Authentic learning “allows students to explore, discover, discuss, and meaningfully construct concepts and relationships in contexts that involve real-world problems and projects that are relevant and interesting to the learner.” This real world learning experience allows the student to problem solve similar to what would happen if they were learning outside a classroom setting. It is also felt that students are able to retain information better in an authentic learning environment. There are various barriers to why educators choose other instructional methods. According to the technical research report, 1995 authentic learning takes longer blocks of time to implement. Learning a single lesson can often take days to complete where with a different instructional method could be complete in less than a day. Authentic learning also includes a multidisciplinary approach to learning. This approach often times requires increase time to have group collaboration and can take longer to plan.

            Many hospital settings have taken the multidisciplinary approach to daily patient rounds. Instead of traditional physician only rounds, providers from pharmacy, nursing, social work, occupational therapy, physical therapy, providers from multiple specialties and most importantly the patient and family are included in the plan of care. It is well researched that multidisciplinary rounds can improve patient outcomes, encourage communication between various levels of care providers and increase satisfaction. Unfortunately, coordinating these rounds takes time and excellent communication to be successful. Hospitals must have buy in from all key stakeholders to make this successful and part of the daily culture.

            I feel that as the student gets older using authentic learning may become easier to implement. I can see this type of learning to be more difficult to implement in a grade school setting compared to a high school or college setting because problems solving skills are much more developed at this time. Also a student has a larger background of knowledge to base decisions on at this time. 

            With my nursing background I believe that authentic nursing is commonly used in the clinical setting. Clinical I would compare to a clinical apprenticeship (discussed in the Lombardi, 2007 article). In nursing school I was given the opportunity to work with the homeless population living in a shelter. We given the task of doing some basic screening (blood pressure, blood glucose, cholesterol check, ect) and then asked to provide education to this population. We needed to be creative because we spent many weeks working in this environment but often our “patients’ were a very transient population. Many of them were unable to read which took away the option of providing traditional pamphlets or poster presentation. Being homeless also did not allow these patients to obtain a well balanced meal. Local companies would provide large amounts of day old bread and doughnuts but not fruits and vegetables. This learning experience forced us to look outside of our traditional recommendations and made a great impact on how we dealt with patients we may be discharging home from a hospital setting.

            I have also previously discussed the use of “sim man” in some nursing education curriculums. This allows for a safe environment with no negative consequences on the patient. These authentic learning environments create lasting retention of information but often at an increase cost of time and resources.