e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates

Scaffolding Activities on basis of active knowledge making

Two points of the affordance "Active Knowledge Making" impress me a lot. One is since students are more like producers, a big challenge for them is how to represent knowledge, facing with so many resources. Another one is a big challenge for teachers: how to achieve a balanced agency with scaffolding? In the following, I'll give two examples that can help me figure out the two problems.

One example happened in one of my master course. That course talked about the philosophy of education, retrospecting the history of the development of education in the U.S and containing a lot of theories and pedagogies famous educators. The final purpose was how to make connections between the theoretical basis with our schools today. In other words, could we make proposals to resolve problems existent in our schools today by applying those philosophies?

When I took that course, the professor gave the whole class a lot of reading materials as assignments. Then she asked us to work in groups to study and prepare a presentation in class. 2/3 of the whole course, she only listened to students' presentations. She said she was a facilitator, not a teacher. But from my perspective, she needed to give more input, at least scaffolding more, especially for students like me, who didn't grow up either accept the education in the U.S. The module taught by that professor was more like individualized content acquisition, not the real facilitation.

You can see from this example; students had challenges to present knowledge sightly from mounts of recourses (materials, opened recourses online); teachers also had difficulties in giving adequate scaffoldings considering students from different backgrounds.

Another example that I would give was a project that I participated in the last semester. The whole course was the same module as project-based learning. The final purpose was to present proposals in groups to resolve some daunting problems we faced currently. Different from the first example, the professor spent the first 4-5 in-person meeting period to help us figure out the problems. She assigned a lot of activities, and I would like to say, each one, was designed for purposes. 

A lot of scaffolding activities were also mentioned in the list made by Berglund, Candefjord & Gil (2020). For example, the kick-off meeting with the supervisor. In our first group meeting after we narrowed down topics, a supervisor was assigned to our group, according to the topic of our group and the strengths of the supervisor. He gave us functional pieces of advice to make the whole group move forward. And we did very well at last.

Now we can see the significant differences from learning with scaffolding and without scaffolding. From my understanding, the E-learning model has made teaching harder for educators since it requests more skills and preparations.

Reference:

Jonatan B., Stefan C. & Jorge G. (2020). Scaffolding Activities for Project-Based Learning. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34702.92487

  • Elineth Suarez
  • Elineth Suarez