Throughout my blogs for Simac IDS, I have made clear that higher education is experiencing an engagement shift – where digital innovations have led to lower in-class attendance, foot fall on campus, and are even impacting engagement in discussions in class. To respond to these developments, I am increasingly hearing that there is both a desire and strategic need to once again place the human being at the centre of an ‘authentic’ higher education. The term ‘authentic’ is not a new label in university contexts, as many institutions have turned towards this to create ‘authentic’ learning environments, assessments and exposure to professional experiences. As such, the term is appearing on increasing numbers of university learning and teaching strategies, and, in 2026 alone, it features on the title of multiple conference themes. My last blog shared my perspectives on the impact of student engagement with learning and assessment in light of Generative AI. This blog will pivot to expand the discussion to consider what ‘authentic’ student engagement means in a world increasingly impacted by the ‘artificial’.
What do we mean by ‘authentic’?
Authenticity in any life experience or service often relates to something being genuine – the ‘real’ reality. It’s now commonly used and commodified in other sectors such as the tourism sector where you are often sold experiences for ‘authentic local cultures’ as part of a package deal day trip; or purchasing ‘authentic cuisine’, which promises the consumer a slice of genuine, real culture and food – something not synthetic, mass-produced, or heavily processed. Turning towards our personal and social lives, authentic experiences in a digital age could be seeing live music, taking part in physical (and non-digital) sports or hobbies. When used as a label in the education context, ‘authentic’ previously has almost always been related to the ‘real world contexts’ – a turn of phrase that prickles many people today – where students would engage in disciplinary research, perhaps in the form of ongoing research projects, or undertake a work experience such as a live project brief or internship. This has been reinvigorated in light of recent technological developments and continues to evolve alongside a sector reconsidering its position and offering against the ‘artifice’.
Authentic assessment: a support for academic integrity and attendance
The agenda of creating authenticity in learning, teaching and assessment experiences has supercharged since 2022, where ‘authentic assessment’ has been adopted widely to support students’ academic integrity in light of Generative AI. Assessments such as live briefs engaging employers as clients for student-consultancy projects, “in-tray exercises” to simulate work-based tasks for professions such as accountancy, and personal reflections, are just a number of the authentic assessments deployed in my institution at Westminster. In addition, these assessments have inspired changes in curriculum planning, using contact time as authentic assessment workshop development time to increase students’ perceptions of the relevance and benefit of their in-person attendance. But what more can be done to make higher education more authentic? For the remainder of this blog, I will use the four domains of student engagement outlined in my blog last year, which are inspired by Trowler’s Literature Review of Student Engagement in 2010, to guide my discussion of authenticity. The domains are: Emotional Engagement, Cognitive Engagement, Behavioural Engagement, Educational Development Engagement (Student Voice; Student Representatives etc).
Are students emotionally engaged in the university? Emotional engagement in higher education brings significant benefits for students, including a sense of belonging, community, and a growing passion for their subject. However, belonging and mattering cannot be manufactured; they must be experienced authentically. It is therefore essential to give careful consideration to how learning environments create opportunities for genuine interaction between students, enabling learning communities to develop. Approaches grounded in relational pedagogies can help to support and manage the emotional investment students make in their education by encouraging staff to empathise with students, demonstrate care, acknowledge frustrations, and ensure students feel that they matter. Authentic emotional engagement emerges through positive affiliations with people and place, which in turn foster outcomes such as academic fulfilment, satisfaction, and success. As I often remark when speaking about belonging, student engagement must involve more than free pizza! Achieving authentic emotional engagement in universities requires the cultivation of strong relationships with students - relationships that are caring, supported by clear services and processes, and underpinned by sound pedagogical philosophy and practice.
Have the students genuinely engaged with the learning outcomes? Bypassing the achievement of learning outcomes, and with it cognitive engagement, should be difficult (if not impossible) in higher education due to the backstop of summative assessment. However, if there is a low level of assessment validity or if there are no attendance regulations to hold students to account in their engagement, it can quickly be unclear whether students have cognitively engaged with the full course or whether they have been strategic in their learning, if indeed at all. Add to this: Generative AI, a digital world infused with micro hits of dopamine pulling away our students’ attention, and sometimes large class sizes giving anonymity to disengagement, authentically engaging our students in learning becomes more and more difficult. To overcome such challenges, learning and teaching scholars argue for innovation in how we teach, towards workshopping, building in time for active consolidation in otherwise didactic sessions, a greater focus on content connection and relevance, and focusing on checking whether learning has been achieved (even informally through techniques like the ‘muddiest point’ (Arizona State University, 2025). We can make better use of formative assessments to understand student learning during the course, and for summative assessment we can explore more programmatic, portfolio and live-brief assessments that assess the wider learning of students and assure cognitive engagement has been achieved. These are quick to type as solutions but difficult to implement, often taking several iterations of a unit of study before they take effect, but the benefits can be more students attending, greater development of transferable skills, and authentic assessment of learning undertaken as part of students’ journeys.
There are students in the room, but are they engaged? If students have watched an online video several times, does this behaviour indicate engagement? Behavioural engagement used to be considered the most reliable measure of student engagement, but this has now come into question. Students may be in the room but doing something completely different on their laptop. Students may have downloaded or watched the recorded content at home but may not have paid attention. Student engagement through behaviours (whether in person or recorded via their digital footprint) is not necessarily authentic as what it might first appear – depending on what you’re looking to measure, of course. To make measures of authentic behavioural engagement more valid we have to go further, to actually engage students in activities and discussions when they do attend physically and ensure there is some form interactivity during or following an engagement online. To achieve meaningful in person engagement, there has to be a perceived relevance for students and a sense that the class is worth expending their cognitive effort on. This is where the two primary modes of motivation for students can be used effectively: assessment and their future careers (O’Neill and Short, 2025). If assessment is the great motivator for cognitive engagement, using this effectively to ensure students are learning the skills and knowledge required for the task is key. If students are focusing on their degree as a route to a desired profession, how might we help facilitate those aims through our teaching and assessment practices to make it more relevant to them. I have seen this first hand this semester in a live brief assessment I led, where we reinforced a student expectation that if they attended, the assessment was going to be much clearer, as the class time was used to develop their understanding and abilities to undertake the task. Time was even set aside for them to work directly on the project under supervision. Just like workers going to the office, they will want to go in when they perceive it beneficial, relevant and developmental to themselves and their goals. Therefore, if wishing to authentically engage students behaviourally, we have to ensure it holds a benefit that takes account of their perspectives.
“We asked the students, so students have had their say.” I am proud to work in a UK Higher Education which remains focused on engaging students in developing the modern university. This remains a top priority for many of the universities I have worked at and have visited. This manifests most commonly through activities such as engaging in dialogue with course representatives, working with the Students’ Union, soliciting feedback via student surveys and direct consultation with individuals or groups of students. At almost every level of university governance - from course level to strategic – it is required to engage students in education development. But how do we ensure this engagement is authentic? I often cite Adam Fletcher’s work who argues for meaningful student involvement in his 2017 book Student Voice Revolution. Fletcher argues that if the engagement is not meaningful to students, it is likely tokenistic and therefore not authentic. In a digital age, student voice is theoretically easier to collect, as we can create digital surveys in minutes and run student voice meetings by Teams. But my test of the authenticity of such opportunities are whether students truly are able to engage honestly in such opportunities – to disagree, to share alternate perspectives from their cohorts, to offer alternate solutions. While I am an advocate and pleased to see student voice being embedded as standard practice at universities now, I also caution the risk that student voice can become a “business as usual” matter, where perhaps students could feel tokenised, and the consultation not meaningful. Students’ must feel they are empowered to use their voice, where not only the digital survey should be accessible, but their staff members in front of them too. Authenticity in student engagement is timely (where possible, in time for them to see changes themselves), dialogic, transparent, clear and genuinely embedded, rather than a final agenda point at the end of the meeting. This will be the topic of my next blog, which will explore the notion of a use-by or best-before date on student engagement. To ultimately ask, when do the student perspectives gained from engagement go out of date?
The need for a counter narrative
The focus of this blog has been the relevance of and need for authenticity in all aspects of the student experience. The learner’s engagement should be at the heart of our educational efforts, and their authentic emotional, cognitive, behavioural and educational development engagement is what underpins this. If we consider the other authentic experiences I noted at the opening of this post, such as culture, food, friendship and life experiences, there is a clear counter narrative that argues just because the alternative to these authentic experiences are perhaps cheaper and more convenient, it is certainly not better. For example, if we want students to engage in person, the experience should be deemed better than engaging with online recordings. Therefore, it is clear that the sector needs to ignite a counter narrative within students to see that higher education one such authentic experience into which it is worth investing their time, energy, and effort.
Tom Lowe has researched and innovated in student engagement across diverse settings for over ten years, in areas such as student voice, retention, employability and student-staff partnership. Tom works at the University of Westminster as Assistant Head of School (Student Experience) in Finance and Accounting where he leads on student experience, outcomes and belonging. Tom is also the Chair of RAISE, a network for all stakeholders in higher education for researching, innovating and sharing best practice in student engagement. Prior to Westminster, Tom was a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Portsmouth and previously held leadership positions for engagement and employability at the University of Winchester. Tom has published two books on student engagement with Routledge; ‘A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theory into Practice’ in 2020 and ‘Advancing Student Engagement in Higher Education: Reflection, Critique and Challenge’ in 2023, and has supported over 40 institutions in consultancy and advisory roles internationally.
References
Arizona State University, 2025. Muddiest Points (Active Learning Strategy). Learning and Teaching Hub. Available at: https://lth.engineering.asu.edu/reference-guide/muddiest-points/#:~:text=Muddiest%20Points%20is%20a%20method,that%20are%20exposed%20%5B1%5D.
Fletcher, A.F., 2017. Student voice revolution: The meaningful student involvement handbook. CommonAction Publishing.
O’Neill, G. and Short, A. 2025. Relevant, practical and connected to the real world: what higher education students say engages them in the curriculum. Irish Educational Studies. 44 (1) 23-40.
