Constructivism in Online Teaching
Guy Bensusan of Northern Arizona University summarized his perspective on how
constructivist principles are applied in teaching online. I quote his
comments from an eModerators listserv (May 12, 2001) with his permission.
The BIG advance toward a totally open constructivism however, came with
the Web. Setting up a series of steps that are open to progression,
peer-to-peer interaction (with teacher as coach) and plenty of opportunity to go back
and revisit earlier steps after making the initial encounter...... leads to
several
highly salutary and productive results...
- Teacher becomes Learner, facilitating and asking questions
calculated to foster learning construction in each learner, so that they take charge
of their own learning.
- Encouraging peer-to-peer interaction in steps ---- each one reads
the assignment, formulates responses and observations, then posts those.....
then reads what all the others wrote..... then goes back and rewrites and
updates, for each assignment.
- Learners become creators, participants, builders, helpers,
evaluators ---- rather than merely recipients of the professors information, slants, and
biases.
- Practice occurs daily and weekly. The process is constructivist
also in that the easier concepts or situations will be mastered first --- NOT as separate units to be tested, but as steps in a
longer stairway or escalator.... each one is practiced, can be returned to as
often as necessary as each learner BUILDS his or her comprehension, scope,
interrelation, causation, information sources, critiques, responses,
evaluation.
- I handle several hundred students at a time from my laptop wherever
I am.... I "WORK" four hours per day, seven days a week.... and the
learners tell me it is MOST Beneficial to them to be able to do their study,
reflection, posting, thinking, creating, revision, and so on, and THEIR convenience
of time and location. And they also say they have MUCH MORE
interpersonal contact and get to know their peers far better.... In my view, this is the high end of constructivism.
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1999