Constructivist E-learning in Higher Education

The use of e-learning has been recommended for all levels of the educational system, thus in higher education as well. However, e-learning is very often reduced to downloading teaching materials from teachers' websites. Students rarely participate in forums discussing some teaching topics, and they even less frequently use a learning management system in their educational process (Dukic & Madaric, 2012). Among learning management systems, the web application Moodle, which is based on the principles of constructivism and constructionism, is particularly popular. Constructivism assumes that learning is a social process where individuals learn through interacting with other people (Pritchard & Woollard, 2010), while constructionism additionally includes correlation of knowledge and social action (Burr, 2003). To encourage students to learn through interaction, we conducted an action research with the attempt to explore the possibilities of initiating discussions on the network forum of the Moodle system. The research was organised within the Pedagogy course in the first year of teacher studies over two academic years. The most important advantages of this way of learning proved to be freedom and flexibility of participation, the possibility of exchanging experiences and ideas, reflection and collaborative learning. Discussions on web forums have also shown certain deficiencies such as inadequate and unequal activity of all participants, lack of connection to the discussions of other participants (monologue form of writing), lack of criticism, lengthy texts, technical problems and the problem of availability of computers connected to the Internet. This research has shown that it is possible to organise constructivist e-learning in which higher education students will enjoy participating.