THE CONNECTIVISM AS A LEARNING THEORY FROM THE PRISM OF BLENDED LEARNING

Digital technologies have greatly altered the way we acquire, share and create new meaning and knowledge. This imposed the need to reflect upon and/or revise the existing theories of knowledge, which ultimately led towards the creation of new learning theories. One of these theories relies upon the connectivist teaching, indicating that the learning is in fact the process of producing connections and perceiving the ones that already exist between different fields and concepts. The connectivism, as a newly created theory emerged from this line of thinking, is considered the learning theory of the digital age, emphasizing, amongst other things, the important place that modern technologies occupy within the educational process. Furthermore, the connectivist teaching was conceived bearing in mind the significant role of social and cultural context in acquiring relevant and up-to date knowledge, while at the same time emphasizing the necessity of networking, which became essential in modern age in order to gain and share knowledge. Moreover, the connectivism focuses on the fact that people nowadays learn from different sources available on the internet, e.g. through web search, forums, emails, various online communities, conversations, blogs, etc. Thus, learning at all levels of education must include these rather informal ways of acquiring knowledge as to avoid becoming obsolete.

This paper will consider the connectivism as a learning theory from the prism of blended learning, as the one that combines the formal way of transferring knowledge and somewhat informal online type of learning, incorporating e-sources that enable the creation and functioning of communities of inquiry. We will indicate how the theory of connectivism can be applied to the blended type of learning on the examples of the courses offered within the Language, Literature, Culture MA and PhD study program available in blended learning format at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade. We will also strive at contributing to the existing dialogue of whether the connectivism actually represents the new learning theory or whether it is really just the successor, i.e. amended version of theories that previously already highlighted the role of social context in the learning process.