The Implications of Distance on Digital Learning

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"Design can solve society’s biggest problems… if we cultivate a love of learning through the design process." – David Sherwin, Director of User Experience at lynda.com

According to Vygotsky, a foundational child psychologist, learning happens through social interaction with others and the environment. If left to discover things on their own, people won’t learn very much – for full cognitive development, they must interact with more experienced learners or materials.

So what implications does this have for digital learning? If we learn best from other people, do we need to see or talk to them in real life?

Here's what I've found.

1. Collaboration among students, specifically in regards to more experienced learners working with less experienced learners, is key for effective learning. It does not matter what medium this happens over. Lesser experienced learners could interact with Wikipedias, online tutorials, apps like DuoLingo, etc.

2. According to research studies, collaborative learning enhances engagement, cognition, and critical thinking. In digital environments when the students are responsible for one another's learning as well as their own, overall outcomes significantly improve.

3. Digital learning tools offer unique chances for children to achieve higher learning, because they can be exposed to more experienced or higher-achieving learners in all subjects. In the standard classroom, a child’s capacity to learn and grow is capped at the highest-achieving peer or teacher, who may not fully understand certain material. If online learning is designed well, children can effectively learn more advanced concepts in subjects like math and languages from their peers.

4. Collaborative wikis allow children to develop more collaborative writing skills at a higher developmental rate than previously thought possible, because of the vast opportunities to share and add information with more experienced learners.

5. Creators of digital learning models (often) do not create the natural social environments people need to fully learn. Speech is highly instrumental in our reasoning abilities and our ability to make sense of the world and our social environments. Digital learning has a lacuna of surrounding speech that we would ordinarily learn from our environment, like real-life conversations between classroom teachers and peers in the classroom, which may have negative consequences on our development. Creators should consider incorporating social tools, like voice-to-voice chat, in their digital frameworks.