Rajbir Saha
(rajbirsaha1995@gmail.com)
Constructivism is a theory of learning. Its root exists in philosophy and psychology. The important thing about constructivism is that the learners construct their own knowledge. Von Glasersfeld presents the three epistemological tenets in which fourth has been added recently, "Knowledge cannot be acquired by being passive, it is the result of the active cognition", "Cognition is an adaptive process that updates human behaviour in the available environment", "Cognition organizes experiences that make up human senses" and the roots of knowledge exist in both biological constructivism, social and cultural interaction. Constructivism accepts the importance of the learner's active role in the formation of knowledge. The personal and social experiences are important in acquiring knowledge. Each person constructs his or her own knowledge on the basis of self-experience. Each person receives knowledge with varying degrees of validity according to his/her intelligence, which makes an accurate representation of reality based on their experience. Cognitive constructivist focuses on accurate mental construction of reality, radical constructivist emphasized the construction of coherent experiential reality, social constructivist believes in the reality constructed by society and social environment. The constructivist approach has been considered very useful in education as it helps students to achieve sustainable learning. When the constructivist approach is used in the classroom in teaching to enhance the learning ability of students, then it is called constructivist pedagogy.
Using constructivism can prove to be very meaningful because constructivism presents new knowledge to students by connecting them with their prior knowledge, by which the student learns and understands the selected topic well. If constructivism is to be used online for teaching, then the following things should be kept in the mind:
1. If the test of the authenticity of online education is accomplished then it can be considered as failed but online education is able to present a virtual environment simulating real-world events.
2. Online education provides equal opportunity to the student to involve social negotiation and mediation. Online education is partially capable of providing all veritable virtual environments simulating real-world events.
3. Must have relevant content and skills for learners. Online education is capable of providing various types of knowledge, information, and skill to the students. It enables the learners to self-select a relevant topic, idea, pro-cess, and skills.
4. Presentations of content and skill in online education can be considered difficult to link with the prior knowledge of the student. For this, it is necessary to have interaction between both the student and facilitator with the online education environment. A synchronous environment is constructed by the facilitator. At the beginning of the instruction in online education, the educational presentation may not be as per the prior knowledge of the students in the first online class, which can be ascertained from the feedback given by the students.
5. Self-motivation and self-regulation are very important for the students to get the education in an online class.
6. If the teachers teach through online mode using constructivist pedagogy, then they will have to perform all the activities mentioned to the students themselves and the students will have to be involved in that activity. They will have to pay attention to the teacher by doing various conversations related to the activities. The teacher can also ask them to complete the activity. They can perform that activity by doing the work of the activity as the students tell them.
In the constructivist pedagogy, the content has to be presented by adding to the prior knowledge of the students. Teachers can present the learning content according to the previous knowledge of the students in the next online class according to the constructivist pedagogy by interacting and creating rapport with the student in the first online constructivist pedagogical class. The online class is said to be capable of presenting the environment of reality, but it is necessary for the students to have self-motivation and self-regulation to get a meaningful education in the class.