Creating a Technology-rich Authentic Learning Environment (TALE): Using a mobile app to engage students in real world learning for Elements of Business Skills
The current study was a translational study on creating educational effectiveness in secondary schools with students from the Normal (Technical) (NT) stream studying the Elements of Business Skills (EBS) subject. This expanded on an earlier study at NIE with EBS students (Koh, 2012) that investigated whether students learnt better when they were able to make meaningful connections between the school curriculum and their learning experiences outside of school at workplace environments. The findings revealed that experiential learning gained from the authentic environment of students’ work attachment contributed to their conceptual understanding of the EBS subject. The study also noted a cross transfer of knowledge and skills from the classroom to the workplace and vice-versa. The aim of this TALE study was to investigate how technology, in the form of a mobile learning application, can enable redesign of the formal curriculum to be expanded to seamlessly accommodate learning that occurs outside of classrooms to align with the goals of the ICT mp4. Mobile learning can be defined as “any kind of learning that takes place inside or outside traditional learning environment via mobile devices [that] are able to move with the learner to allow learning anytime, anywhere” (Alavi, Nematbakhsh, & Zeraati, 2018, p. 113).