 In terms of course design, one would expect that if you're adopting a constructivist theory or approach to learning that you would encourage experiential learning. You would encourage situations where students can interact with new situations, situations that are quote-unquote real-world situations. You can of course simulate them through cases, but the importance of this is that you're not simply telling students what to do. You're encouraging them to discover for themselves, to engage in inquiry in order to be able to make meaning of the experience that they're having, to reflect on the experience and to combine it with past experience in order to be able to come up with a deeper understanding of what they're learning. Although we're learning in an online environment, a lot of the same principles about effective learning will apply as they do to face-to-face learning. I think it's important that we understand that the medium might be different, but the principles are the same. In structuring the online course, you would create opportunities for students to interact with each other, for students to reflect on some of the, say, readings and some of the cases, perhaps, or whatever course materials you might be putting online. So the online environment is an active one. It's not a static one where you simply put materials online and leave it to the student to succeed or not succeed. You have to guide their interaction with those materials. Constructivist theories of learning apply to online course design. I would probably think of that approach as being sort of a supercharged version of the cognitive approach, in that you emphasize even more activities and the idea that the individual is an active participant in the learning experience. Again, for my own personal experience with online courses that really are blended courses, it's challenging to achieve that kind of activity. I mean, I guess I'd do it by getting people to do assignments and things like that, but that would be a tricky goal. I think it would probably be easier to do if you were having a lot more group work and things like that, where you could get people to interact with each other and maybe discover things on their own to some extent. I feel very strongly about constructivism. I am a constructivist. I am a social constructivist in my teaching practice. And so the idea of creating a space, whether it be in class or in particular online, creating a space in which what students bring to the space is valued and a space in which they're allowed or they're given the freedom, the opportunity to collaborate with each other, to inquire of each other and to create and edit and rebuild knowledge and conversation and to construct new knowledge and new artifacts. That's important to me, and in particular within a foreign language setting, a very, shall we call it, Vygotskyan approach in which real language learning cannot happen without a social context. And so because of that now, I am building courses and activities within courses and assessments within courses that allow students to question and to personalize and to invest themselves because it refers back to them. It relates to their own realities. So here is my statement about how this particular grammatical structure works. How does that sound in your life? Constructivist theories of learning are really useful, I would say, in the idea of active learning in general and really important in online course design. One of the central ideas around constructivism as a theory, whether we're talking about it in terms of education or in other areas, is the idea that knowledge is really social. And so a lot of the kind of social interactions around it, the social reinforcement of it, is really central to internalizing new knowledge. And so that idea gets used in course design to suggest that if you have students interacting with each other around the new knowledge, it really helps them to internalize it, to assimilate it, and to be transformed by it in some way, to have it become part of their world view. So that they're given these opportunities not just to reflect on it on their own, but to figure out how to explain it to someone else. And we know from a lot of the research out there that one of the best ways to really reinforce learning is to ask someone to teach something to someone else. And so some of the even face-to-face kinds of methodologies that get used, like peer instruction, are based in this idea. And in the online environment, when you're using this constructivist theory of knowledge or constructivist approach to education, you build those opportunities right into the online learning environments. The online environment is ideal for constructivist approaches because there you're looking at setting a problem where students have to go through a process of discovery to solve the problem. And you've chosen the problem very carefully because it's going to lead to certain kinds of engagement with materials or with the professor or with other students that are going to scaffold a learning experience. And the web, the online environment, is full of resources. I mean, that's if I hear anything from students now, it's why do I have to buy the book or why do I have to learn it's all out there. All right, so let's mine that resource. And that's where the constructivist approach is just perfect for online course design because we're taking all those rich resources and helping students navigate their way through them to achieve specific learning outcomes. And in doing that, we create a very creative space for students, one that's rich with interactions with the professor and with other students and with the content material. And finally, you get the research indicates that you get a deeper understanding and longer retention of materials when you use a constructivist approach to online learning. Because you're getting an interaction with the materials in a different way. And in some ways this isn't new in grade eight, and this is many, many years ago. I did a project on Texas. And I could have read stuff about Texas, but I actually designed a map with some flower and some of these materials you would make something from. And I had to color it and then I had to work with it in an interactive way. And I've never forgotten where I've forgotten many, many other things. And so we're creating the same thing in an online environment, a rich interactive environment where we're actually doing something. It's very much project oriented. And so I think the more instructors can think about all these resources are out there, what learning activities, what problems can I set from a constructivist framework that will bring that together to achieve the learning outcomes that I want. That I think makes a very powerful online environment.