Comparison of International Baccalaureate (IB) chemistry students’ preferred vs actual experience with a constructivist style of learning in a Moodle e‐learning environment

Purpose – Constructivism is a way of knowing where learners collaborate, reflect and use their own experiences to construct new knowledge. This paper aims to evaluate whether an open source Moodle e‐learning can deliver an instructional model using constructivist learning theories in an International Baccalaureate chemistry class.Design/methodology/approach – A review of the literature shows that students’ learning outcomes online are likely to be better when their actual learning environment closely matches their preferred or ideal learning environment. An online learning survey was administered to the students towards the end of their two‐year course and the Wilcoxon signed rank test used to measure the difference between the student's actual and preferred experiences with the online activities that used constructivist theories.Findings – The findings showed that the activities provided by Moodle do foster a constructivist approach to learning and can provide students with the types of learning experien...