Pros and Cons of student centered communities

This outstanding question was posed by the co instructors of EDUC 761 Collaboration Communities one of the course in the sequence for the UofW Certificate in E Learning and Online Teaching. I am blogging about in response to this excellent question.

Background Information

Vygotsky's constructivist theory, which is often called social constructivism, has much more room for an active, involved teacher. For Vygotsky the culture gives the child the cognitive tools needed for development. The type and quality of those tools determines, to a much greater extent than they do in Piaget's theory, the pattern and rate of development. Adults such as parents and teachers are conduits for the tools of the culture, including language. The tools the culture provides a child include cultural history, social context, and language. Today they also include electronic forms of information access.

We call Vygotsky's brand of constructivism social constructivism because he emphasized the critical importance of culture and the importance of the social context for cognitive development. Vygotsky's the zone of proximal development is probably his best-known concept. It argues that students can, with help from adults or children who are more advanced, master concepts and ideas that they cannot understand on their own.
Source:

http://viking.coe.uh.edu/~ichen/ebook/et-it/social.htm

Working from the definition above:

Cons:

Time, the social constructivist approach, just like all learner centered approaches, is much more time consuming for the facilitator for a number of reasons. This approach implies instructional design for multiple learning styles, multiple paths for learning, a variety of access points and, at the community college level, more than a nodding acquaintance with learning theory.
A second con lies in the assumptions about both the learner and culture. A pessimist might argue that both are ill prepared for the demands of liberal arts and rigorous inquiry.

Personal experiences of con

Since beginning the UofW Stout certificate program in E Learning and Online Teaching I have attempted to redesign the online courses I teach at MCC. This had been unbelievably time consuming process and trying to do this while teaching has been a challenge.

Given the time demands, I do not have a course ready for delivery in revised format, further illustrating the challenge or negative impact of time demand on course revision.

This brings up another negative from my experience. I am the only economics faculty member in my department pursing this line of analysis for my delivery of courses, either online or in person. All the other economics faculty are content centered and I mean, real, content centered. This merely reflects the nature of the discipline, but increasingly I find I have less in common with the economists in my institution and more with the philosophers. Ah, perhaps this is as much a positive as a negative.

Another negative is the heterogeneous makeup of my students. While some are clearly subject to the assumptions of androgogy some of the more optimistic assumptions of this theory and social constructivism may not apply to the more academically immature learners.

Pros

Learning about social constructivism and the related issues of a learner centered approach to instruction have simulated my thinking about how economics can be taught. It lead me to a great analysis by David Colander The Complexity Vision and the Teaching of Economics and has presented a set of instructional challenges that I find to be very interesting.

Greg