Educating Digital Natives

Over the past several years the University of Auckland Business School’s Department of Property has redesigned several of its core papers to embrace online learning and other technologies in order to challenge and create an exciting learning environment for our undergraduate students. Three courses have adopted a blended learning model with purpose-made online lectures coupled with regular interactive face-to-face tutorial sessions featuring the online Top Hat student response system. These and other papers have also embraced two free Internet tools developed by the University of Auckland. Aropa enables students to peer review classmates’ assignments while Peerwise invites students to draft their own practice questions and share them with their peers. Lastly, the no-cost online Q&A platform Piazza is being incorporated into the Department’s courses to allow students to crowdsource answers to their questions from peers with academics and teaching assistants monitoring and contributing when needed. Being digital natives, university students are enamoured by these innovative teaching methods and are taking full advantage of the flexibility and enriched learning that these tools offer.