Let's Riff Off RIFS (Relevant, Interesting, Fun, and Social)

Online learning allows one to escape traditional constraints and to create learning experiences that allow interactions, and support learning, that would be difficult or impossible in brick and mortar contexts. In this chapter, the authors present a new RIFS taxonomy (Relevance, Interestingness, Fun, and Sociality) to highlight the factors that can make a learning experience especially engaging. They then discuss what they want students to learn when they are engaged in support of 21st century learning. With this context, they describe an initiative called The Global Teenager Project as a concrete example of how, with heavy support from online technologies, these factors can be combined to produce deep learning that students truly find meaningful.