Social Constructivism and Online Learning

I believe an online education can be a fulfilling and valuable experience, but it has obvious limitations when scrutinized by Constructivists.

The best experience I had in education was at San Antonio College. I started there after high school in the Advertising Art program. Many of the classes I took there were taught by professionals from the local advertising and design agencies. Even the permanent faculty worked closely with the different agencies. Most classes were centered around the completion of an advertising campaign based on an assignment given to us by the agency. If it was a copy writing class the focus was on copy and the agency’s copywriter would be our advisor. Two or three times throughout the course we would meet at the agency and discuss the progress of our campaign. The final class was at the agency and we had to pitch our final product to the professionals as if they were the client. It does not get much more authentic than that. I learned so much during my time there. I did not really appreciate it until I moved on to Texas State University. The program is highly rated, but I found a much less authentic environment and was disappointed with my experience.

Constructivism is strongly tied to social interaction. Although we have great discussions via the internet there are several issues that make it difficult to say it is as constructive as a face-to-face class. The authentic learning which is important to Constructivists is not always practical in this setting. The blogs are a great way of connecting to other professionals but still does not provide the same experience I mentioned before. Responses by others in the class are great but the ideas are usually well thought out and lack the spontaneous debate that happens face-to-face. I think the discussion is often deeper than a face-to-face would be so there are some benefits. Scaffolding, Reciprocal teaching, and Peer collaboration all have their limits in this forum. Another issue with online courses is the environment. When you go to a brick and mortar school and sit in a class the environment is conducive to learning. That environment is not always available in this situation. Another idea that stood out in the reading this week fell under the premise of Situated Cognition. Students exposed to a certain procedure for learning a subject experience situated cognition for that method; in other words, that is how this content is learned (Ormrod, Schunk, & Gredler, 2009, p. 187). If we learn in an online environment will we only be able to perform in an online environment?

I think that these issues and others mentioned in this week’s text are minimized by maturity and experience in both learning environments. Personality and learning style also plays a significant role. I believe in online education and feel I will get as much out of it as I put in. There are however, limitations to this format.