Global trends in higher education (HEd) focus on the development of lifelong learning skills for a complex world and on cross-disciplinary expertise. This necessitates reconceptualising curricula to adopt a more authentic, student-centred approach to teaching, learning, and assessment, promoting the development of not only graduate attributes but also lifelong, self-directed learning (SDL) skills. According to the literature, the development of SDL skills is best promoted through authentic learning settings (Goldman et al., 2009; Jennings, 2007; Taylor & Hamdy, 2013). Within the health sciences domain, authentic learning reflects professional practice and means that students should be able to collaborate within an interprofessional team (van Woezik et al., 2021). Due to the significant transformation in the current workplace, part of the authenticity of teaching, learning, and assessment practices within HEd should include the development of much-needed digital competencies. Utilising such digital competencies through using “digital tools and technologies to explore creative ideas and new ways of displaying ideas, research, or work” is known as digital creativity (University of York, 2019, p. 1). However, the literature on the affordances of authentic pedagogy (teaching, learning, and assessment), including digital creativity, in supporting the development of health sciences students as self-directed, interprofessional individuals is scant. This qualitative study examined the benefits of integrating authentic pedagogy and digital creativity in developing health sciences students as self-directed, interprofessional individuals. Interprofessional collaboration, digital tools as enablers of creativity and collaboration, real-world application of knowledge, development of key self-directed learning skills, and barriers to engagement emerged as the major themes. The findings demonstrate that when students are immersed in meaningful, complex, and collaborative tasks, they do not merely acquire disciplinary knowledge or technical skills. Rather, they engage in processes of professional becoming that encompass cognitive, relational, and intrapersonal dimensions of learning.
Pool et al. (Mon,) studied this question.