As established educators, you have already encountered these learning theories enough to apply them to your classroom practice, but unless you have spent a good deal of time teaching and/or learning online, applying these concepts to the digital space is going to work a little differently than you are accustomed to. For example, the moment your student sits down in your digital classroom, they are sitting at an all-purpose information center which can answer any question they may dream up.
To support this new wave of learning, we educators must become the guide on the side in lieu of the sage on the stage because, like it or not, our learners will quickly find a thousand websites to support or refute our lessons as they deem fit. The following is a list of learning theories for us to reconsider in the light of eLearning application. The last section is a deep dive into the critical importance of teaching information literacy. We cannot stop the tsunami of interconnected information, but we can teach our charges how to differentiate truth from propaganda and outright lie.
Learners construct meaning from lessons, lectures, and content; they do not memorize rote facts from learning encounters that they regurgitate in assessments. We do this by creating courses which center around questions rather than answers, discussions rather than lectures, and projects which demonstrate complexity rather quizzes or worksheets that demonstrate memorized vocabulary. Click on any of the buttons on the left to visit a resource focused on a type of Constructivist Learning in an online class. Remember to bookend your course content (or scaffold it) with introduction to the activity and a call-back where students report on the experience. You can design this into web discussions, forms, or live video meetings depending on your course design and modality.
The Zones of Proximal Development refers to a person's ability to move between zones of knowledge with the help of a capable mentor. Tasks on the web will need to be just beyond a student's zone to engage interest but not so far beyond that it causes frustration. One strategy is to use small groups in web meetings where some students mentor others. Try to rotate the mentorship so that those being mentored can mentor others as the lessons progress. Bear in mind that technology to take or engage in a class is also something learners need to learn and thus also fits in the ZPD.
Connectivism is an extension of constructivist learning theory that is elaborated for the digital age. It considers the nuanced ways in which all our learning is interconnected to all our other learning and to other learners. In the same way that a complex algorithm can predict what sorts of interest you may have based on what you search for on the web, these same predictive models can be "reverse-engineered" to identify the interconnection of knowledge. Additionally, gone is the way of learning our times tables in isolation--we now learn the times tables in connection with application of, say, party-planning which we can construct through interacting with friends across social media and internet searches. Knowledge is not constructed in a silo, but in a network.
Simply put, you will need to combine these four learning theories into your application process as you design your eLearning courses using Backwards Design. As you develop your learning outcomes on which zone your learners are currently, you will need to scaffold their learning with several formative assessments using learning objects that you create using 9 events of instruction as a checklist of content development. Your assessments should always take into account the interconnectedness of your learners both to each other and to the world through the World-wide web and what that means for networked learning.
As I always say when I start working with faculty through their first experiences with instructional design, remember this: "Rather than ask how you will make your face-to-face learning experiences work online, ask yourself what is it you can do online to teach to your learning outcomes that you cannot do in a traditional classroom? That is, what does the worldwide web provide you educationally that is an advantage over your face to face classrooms?" (Matthews).
Weaving each of these concepts together into effective eLearning delivery also requires a sharp and constant eye toward information literacy. As you shift from sage on the stage and encourage your learners to effectively question authority, they will begin to explore the web to find answers to complex questions from sources which may be questionable. Given that we live in an age of "fake news," doctored images through the miracles of Photoshop, artificial intelligence and computer-generated graphics, and consumerism driven by the metadata of every click we make using an Internet browser, it is now more intensely urgent than ever that we teach future generations how to recognize truthful and evidence-based information over lies.