The online learning process and scaffolding in student teachers’ personal learning environments

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) enable lifelong learning and make competences visible in education and professional life. This paper illuminates how to design an online learning process that enables deep learning through PLEs based upon our study of a scaffolding process supported by Web 2.0 tools. Professional student teachers developed their own blogs as PLEs, and we collected data from five student teacher groups. We employed the DIANA pedagogical model to design a dialogical, collaborative, and authentic learning process before comparing its activities against the activities of the five-stage model for scaffolding designed for online learning processes. The results indicate that the DIANA model includes the elements of the five-stage model, and it appears that teacher scaffolding is particularly important in student PLEs. These findings provide insights to other practitioners seeking to design and implement online learning processes that are based on collaborative knowledge construction utilizing students’ Personal Learning Environments.