From constructivist to connectivist teaching and learning

I have never believed in a purely ‘instructivist’ model of higher education for my courses, whereby the role of the teacher is only to ‘transfer knowledge down’ to the students (Crosslin, 2016). Instead, I largely subscribe to a constructivist approach to teaching and learning. Among other things, this means that I conceive of my role more as that of a “guide, helper, and partner” who constructs various “educational interventions” to enhance the students’ learning (Anderson & Dron, 2011: 86).   This also means that my courses are designed for students to contribute to their content through various assignments done throughout the course. Within my courses, a number of student assignments get published for all participants to see. Sometimes, especially in the case of group assignments, all the assignments get published (after I have checked them for plagiarism, etc.). In other cases, I see my role as a matter of ‘curating’ which student reflections get published and which do not – trying to give voice to certain views which I believe other participants would benefit from seeing featured. Why do I think it makes sense for me to do this? I think that at the core I might want to be ‘in control’ and have a concern that letting everything be published automatically would be too ‘uncontrolled’.

However, through my readings, reflections and discussions on learning blogs in the ONL course, I have come to realize that perhaps spending time on curating which student contributions get published, sometimes at the cost of providing quality feedback, might not be such a good investment of my time as an educator. In addition, I increasingly feel there might not be so much need to control which reflections are shared with everyone, and that a ‘connectivist’ pedagogical approach (Anderson & Dron, 2011; Crosslin, 2016; Wang et al., 2014) might be more rewarding for all participants. In a MOOC for which I have been one of the educators, I have had to let go of the need to control what participants get to see. I was a bit scared when I saw the number of participants from countries which are particularly politically polarized today, and on one or two occasions the discussion got close to becoming problematically tense due to different political views. But thankfully, it did not escalate. Now, if no real clashes happened in a MOOC with several thousands of students and over 100 countries, perhaps I can be reassured that controlling the student contributions in the context of a much smaller course should not be my priority.

Instead, it would make sense for me to introduce learning blogs in some courses, and in those courses to stop devoting as much time to ‘controlling’ the course. I am sure my role as a ‘guide, helper and partner’ in relation to the learners would in fact be enhanced by a connectivist design, where all participants are encouraged to comment on each other’s blog posts, and where I spend time commenting as well. At this point, having just taught a course where more than half the participants have invaluable experience and expertise (practitioners working on sustainability issues from different sectors), I feel that it is a pity that the reflections they produced could not be read and commented upon by other participants, it could have enriched the learning a great deal. For this reason, I am planning to further transform this course next year and make it a more connectivist course.

References

Anderson, T., & Dron, J. (2011). Three generations of distance education pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(3), 80-97.

Crosslin, M. (2016). From instructivism to connectivism: theoretical underpinnings of MOOCs. Current Issues in Emerging eLearning, 3(1), 6.

Wang, Z., Chen, L., & Anderson, T. (2014). A framework for interaction and cognitive engagement in connectivist learning contexts. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 15(2), 121-141.