The Use of WebQuests to Promote Democratic Education in a Higher Education Context

Background

WebQuests aim to foster meaningful learning by combining innovation and technology under a constructivist approach. Kujawa (2006) described it as an alternative solution to explicit teaching instruction that encourages students to uncover meaning and construct new knowledge for themselves. In this line, Churchill (2006) argues, WebQuests promote the active role of learners by shifting the focus of instruction from the teacher to the learners, who are responsible for setting the pace of their learning, improving their skills and developing their autonomy and independence in this virtual learning environment. March (2003) highlighted scaffolding as one of the main processes fostered by these ICT tools thanks to their multifaceted nature that helps learners to progress through various online tasks and, therefore, go beyond their current levels of skill and knowledge in order to lay the foundations for their own learning.

According to such a constructivist perspective, this online pedagogical tool can promote the efficient participation of students in the learning process, using the Internet as a rich source of information that is at their disposal to access, analyse and transform content related to the area they are studying into meaningful learning (Wu, 2021).