Konstruktivism i distansutbildning : studerandes uppfattningar om konstruktivistiskt lärande

The main purpose of this thesis was to clarify whether there would be difficulties in using constructivistic learning in distance education in which interactive video was used. Other purposes of the thesis were to study the quality of learning in distance education compared to conventional education, and to study the quality of learning in constructivistic education compared to traditional education. The thesis consists of five studies in which three treat distance education and constructivistic learning. The first study treats distance education on its own, and the last study treats constuctivistic learning in conventional study groups. The methods in all studies were questionnaires for all participans, complemented with interviews in three studies. In the studies about constructivistic learning, the questionnaire contained questions to measure the extent of the constructivistic learning environment. The questionnaire in the first study contained questions to find out the participants' opinions about the course. The main hypothesis was that it would be more difficult to introduce constructivistic learning in distance education using interactive media, compared to conventional education. The findings from the studies could by no means verify this hypothesis. All the findings showed that the difficulties in distance education did not influence the possibilities to introduce constructivistic learning negatively. As to the quality of the distance students' learning there were some conflicting results. One group when tested achieved lower results than its reference group and the other groups did just as well as their reference groups. In the questionnaire the students claimed that the use of interactive video did not mean that the quality of learning was affected in negative ways. The findings in the last study showed that the students' opinions about the quality was much higher for the constructivistic group than its reference group. When tested the constructivistic group achieved better results in three out of four tests, but the differences were too small to be of any significance.digitalisering@um