Engaging the Learner in Sakai
The Web Design course portal is a social constructivist framework informed by the learning principles codified by the National Research Council (2000) in their canonical work entitled How People Learn.
Chief among these principles is engaging students in a dynamic conversational framework that establishes early in the course an empathetic bond (Holmberg, 2003) among students and professor.
I create this bond by engaging students early in the course through assignments that get students accustomed to interacting with me. First, I ask, what is your e-mail address? Second, I ask, what goals do you hope to accomplish in this course? Soon after the students answer, I reply with a customized feedback message.
Later in the course, it is inevitable that the students will encounter difficulty, hopefully not with Sakai, but probably with more advanced course content. When this happens, the students enter an educational space that Vygotzky called the Zone of Proximal Development; I simply call it the Zone. It is in the Zone that you can use the Sakai coaching protocol to help students whenever they encounter difficulty. This is the most important element of eLearning, and I am pleased that Sakai does it very well.
Reference
Homberg, B. (2003). A Theory of Distance Education Based on Empathy. In M.G. Moore and W.G. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of Distance Education (pp. 79-86). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
