Utilizing three different learning systems in a constructivist e-learning setting Author (original) (raw)

Constructivist teaching in an e-learning setting places special emphasis on the use of discussion boards. The implementation of a constructivist didactic concept of a course delivered at the department of education of the university of Salzburg, Austria, is presented. Students are prompted to check their constructed knowledge for viability in the discussion fora of Blackboard, the department's learning platform. Teaching staff, in their role as moderators, hope to be able to gradually reduce their presence in the discussions; the challenge lies in being able to measure the extent to which this was achieved, considering that hundreds of discussion threads and thousands of discussion contributions need to be analyzed. This paper describes how a further learning platform -teachNOWwas utilized, interfacing with Blackboard, to generate data files that can be used by the social network software UCINET, which in turn was used to produce graphical presentation of discussion threads. With this method the roles of the moderators in the discussions were made apparent, a task that otherwise would have not been easily possible.

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