Authentic learning is the idea of teaching students in a way that applies to their real world situations.

Throughout my schooling experiences, I always found myself questioning the tasks set in front of me. Why am I doing this? What is the point? When will I EVER need to use this? Why should I want to do this? Authentic learning is about having answers to these questions.

I think the main reason that it's important to set authentic tasks for students is to motivate the students. If a student sees no reason to do a task, of course they're going to be reluctant. Even as a university student, I am still reluctant to complete tasks that I feel are irrelevant, and usually just achieve the bare minimum that I have to. The problem with this is that university students are their willingly working to achieve a degree, but school students are their because they have to be. Already this creates a motivation issue, so authentic learning helps to improve motivation issues.

When I was told I had to make an authentic learning task, I was a worried. In the end, my task was not as authentic as I might've hoped, but I still believe students would enjoy tackling my Assignment 3 task and would really engage with the information they're learning.

Here are some helpful links on Authentic Learning:
Authentic Learning Supported by Technology
Teaching as a subversive activity