This fall, MIT Professor Shigeru Miyagawa flipped his classroom as he taught two versions of Visualizing Japan to two distinctive audiences at the same time. He co-taught the massive online open course (MOOC) VJx on edX, as well as the residential version of the course, 21F.027, to students at MIT. The students in the residential class were assigned the MOOC video lectures and quizzes to complement their classroom work.
An extended discourse ensued in and around the status of connectivism as a learning theory for the digital age. This led to a number of questions in relation to existing learning theories. Do they still meet the needs of today’s learners, and anticipate the needs of learners of the future? Would a new theory that encompasses new developments in digital technology be more appropriate, and would it be suitable for other aspects of learning, including in the traditional class room, in distance education and e-learning? In this article, I highlight current theories of learning and critically analyze connectivism within the context of its predecessors, to establish if it has anything new to offer as a learning theory or as an approach to teaching for the 21st Century.
T. Daradoumis, R. Bassi, F. Xhafa, and S. Caballé. P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing (3PGCIC), 2013 Eighth International Conference on, page 208-213. IEEE, (2013)