Group items tagged

Online learning allows for flexibility of access, from anywhere and usually at anytime—essentially, it allows participants to collapse time and space (Cole, 2000)—however, the learning materials must be designed properly to engage the learner and promote learning.

Cognitive psychology claims that learning involves the use of memory, motivation, and thinking, and that reflection plays an important part in learning.

The development of effective online learning materials should be based on proven and sound learning theories.

Early computer learning systems were designed based on a behaviorist approach to learning. The behaviorist school of thought, influenced by Thorndike (1913), Pavlov (1927), and Skinner (1974), postulates that learning is a change in observable behavior caused by external stimuli in the environment (Skinner, 1974).

Therefore, before any learning materials are developed, educators must, tacitly or explicitly, know the principles of learning and how students learn.

Constructivist theorists claim that learners interpret information and the world according to their personal reality, and that they learn by observation, processing, and interpretation, and then personalize the information into personal knowledge (Cooper, 1993; Wilson, 1997).

The design of online learning materials can include principles from all three. According to Ertmer and Newby (1993), the three schools of thought can in fact be used as a taxonomy for learning. Behaviorists' strategies can be used to teach the “what” (facts), cognitive strategies can be used to teach the “how” (processes and principles), and constructivist strategies can be used to teach the “why” (higher level thinking that promotes personal meaning and situated and contextual learning).

The behaviorist school sees the mind as a “black box,” in the sense that a response to a stimulus can be observed quantitatively, totally ignoring the effect of thought processes occurring in the mind.

Learners should be told the explicit outcomes of the learning so that they can set expectations and can judge for themselves whether or not they have achieved the outcome of the online lesson. 2.  Learners must be tested to determine whether or not they have achieved the learning outcome. Online testing or other forms of testing and assessment should be integrated into the learning sequence to check the learner's achievement level and to provide appropriate feedback. 3.  Learning materials must be sequenced appropriately to promote learning. The sequencing could take the form of simple to complex, known to unknown, and knowledge to application. 4.  Learners must be provided with feedback so that they can monitor how they are doing and take corrective action if required.

Cognitivists see learning as an internal process that involves memory, thinking, reflection, abstraction, motivation, and meta-cognition.

Online instruction must use strategies to allow learners to attend to the learning materials so that they can be transferred from the senses to the sensory store and then to working memory.

Online learning strategies must present the materials and use strategies to enable students to process the materials efficiently.

information should be organized or chunked in pieces of appropriate size to facilitate processing.

Use advance organizers to activate an existing cognitive structure or to provide the information to incorporate the details of the lesson (Ausubel, 1960).

Use pre-instructional questions to set expectations and to activate the learners' existing knowledge structure.

Use prerequisite test questions to activate the prerequisite knowledge structure required for learning the new materials.

To facilitate deep processing, learners should be asked to generate the information maps during the learning process or as a summary activity after the lesson (Bonk & Reynolds, 1997).

The cognitive school recognizes the importance of individual differences, and of including a variety of learning strategies in online instruction to accommodate those differences

The Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI) (Kolb, 1984) looks at how learners perceive and process information, whereas the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1978) uses dichotomous scales to measure extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception. In the following discussion, we consider the Kolb Learning Style Inventory.

Attention: Capture the learners' attention at the start of the lesson and maintain it throughout the lesson. The online learning materials must include an activity at the start of the learning session to connect with the learners. Relevance: Inform learners of the importance of the lesson and how taking the lesson could benefit them. Strategies could include describing how learners will benefit from taking the lesson, and how they can use what they learn in real-life situations. This strategy helps to contextualize the learning and make it more meaningful, thereby maintaining interest throughout the learning session. Confidence: Use strategies such as designing for success and informing learners of the lesson expectations. Design for success by sequencing from simple to complex, or known to unknown, and use a competency-based approach where learners are given the opportunity to use different strategies to complete the lesson. Inform learners of the lesson outcome and provide ongoing encouragement to complete the lesson. Satisfaction: Provide feedback on performance and allow learners to apply what they learn in real-life situations. Learners like to know how they are doing, and they like to contextualize what they are learning by applying the information in real life.

Online strategies that facilitate the transfer of learning should be used to encourage application in different and real-life situations.

Constructivists see learners as being active rather than passive.

it is the individual learner's interpretation and processing of what is received through the senses that creates knowledge.

“the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience in order to guide future action” (p. 12).

Learning should be an active process. Keeping learners active doing meaningful activities results in high-level processing, which facilitates the creation of personalized meaning. Asking learners to apply the information in a practical situation is an active process, and facilitates personal interpretation and relevance.

Learners should construct their own knowledge rather than accepting that given by the instructor.

Collaborative and cooperative learning should be encouraged to facilitate constructivist learning (H

When assigning learners for group work, membership should be based on the expertise level and learning style of individual group members, so that individual team members can benefit from one another's strengths.

  Learners should be given control of the learning process

Learners should be given time and opportunity to reflect.

Learning should be made meaningful for learners. The learning materials should include examples that relate to students, so that they can make sense of the information.

Learning should be interactive to promote higher-level learning and social presence, and to help develop personal meaning. According to Heinich et al. (2002), learning is the development of new knowledge, skills, and attitudes as the learner interacts with information and the environment. Interaction is also critical to creating a sense of presence and a sense of community for online learners, and to promoting transformational learning (Murphy & Cifuentes, 2001). Learners receive the learning materials through the technology, process the information, and then personalize and contextualize the information.

Figure 1-6. Components of effective online learning.

Behaviorist strategies can be used to teach the facts (what); cognitivist strategies to teach the principles and processes (how); and constructivist strategies to teach the real-life and personal applications and contextual learning. There is a shift toward constructive learning, in which learners are given the opportunity to construct their own meaning from the information presented during the online sessions. The use of learning objects to promote flexibility and reuse of online materials to meet the needs of individual learners will become more common in the future. Online learning materials will be designed in small coherent segments, so that they can be redesigned for different learners and different contexts. Finally, online learning will be increasingly diverse to respond to different learning cultures, styles, and motivations.

Online instruction occurs when learners use the Web to go through the sequence of instruction, to complete the learning activities, and to achieve learning outcomes and objectives (Ally, 2002; Ritchie & Hoffman, 1997).

If the answers to these two questions are "yes," a court is likely to find a use fair

whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner

the purpose of copyright—to promote the advancement of knowledge through balancing the rights of owners and users.

In some cases, this will mean using a clip or excerpt; in other cases, the whole work is needed. Whenever possible, educators should provide proper attribution and model citation practices that are appropriate to the form and context of use.

educators should provide reasonable protection against third-party access and downloads

educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be free to enable learners to incorporate, modify, and re-present existing media objects in their own classroom work

Students’ use of copyrighted material should not be a substitute for creative effort

Students should be able to understand and demonstrate, in a manner appropriate to their developmental level, how their use of a copyrighted work repurposes or transforms the original.

but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simply to establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songs simply to exploit their appeal and popularity

material that is incorporated under fair use should be properly attributed wherever possible

attribution, in itself, does not convert an infringing use into a fair one.

If student work that incorporates, modifies, and re-presents existing media content meets the transformativeness standard, it can be distributed to wide audiences under the doctrine of fair use.

When sharing is confined to a delimited network, such uses are more likely to receive special consideration under the fair use doctrine

there are no cut-and-dried rules (such as 10 percent of the work being quoted, or 400 words of text, or two bars of music, or 10 seconds of video).

Transformativeness, a key value in fair use law, can involve modifying material or putting material in a new context, or both

Copyright Act itself makes it clear that educational uses will often be considered fair because they add important pedagogical value to referenced media objects.

If educators or learners want to share their work only with a class (or another defined, closed group) they are in a favorable position

if work is going to be shared widely, it is good to be able to rely on transformativeness

courts have found that asking permission and then being rejected has actually enhanced fair use claims.

We don’t know of any lawsuit actually brought by an American media company against an educator over the use of media in the educational process

the computer, keeping detailed records on student performance and using these records in making decisions about what is next to be presented to the student.

In our traditional learning environments, some students learn and some do not. It is this second group of students that we want to help.

problem of almost all modern learning is the lecture, a noninteractive way of learning

, on a moment-to-moment basis, just what the student knows and just what learning problems are occurring

It begins immediately with a question, with no preceding text.

experience the joy of discovery.

tutorial approach to learning makes it possible for everyone to learn.

critical factor is that we can react to individual student problems

key concept for structuring highly interactive learning experiences is the Benjamin Bloom concept of mastery learning.

goal is for everyone to learn everything to the mastery level, grades will no longer be useful

A student who has not learned in one way probably needs a different approach, rather than another go-round with the material that was not previously successful in assisting learning.

In such an environment, learning and evaluation are no longer separate activities but are part of the same process, intimately blended. So the student is not conscious of taking tests, and we avoid the problems of cheating.

highly interactive learning is intrinsically motivating. Motivation is particularly important in a distance-learning environment, since none of the "threats" of the classroom, such as low grades, are available.

mastery-based computer segment could also offer human contact. Small groups could work together, either locally or remotely via electronic communication.

existing authoring systems. Since they were, and still are, mostly directed toward supplying information, these were inadequate for creating highly interactive software.

Bertrand Ibrahim at the University of Geneva,

omputer stores much of the information as the students progress through the material.

Teaching faculty, in the sense that we know them today, may cease to exist, except for in smaller, advanced courses. But their skills and experiences will be important in the design of learning modules.

High costs of development can lead to low costs per student, if many students use the material.

$30,000 per student-hour of high-quality learning material

highly effective highly interactive distance-learning courses would have a large potential market, making them much cheaper per student than current courses, and if well developed, they will be much superior for almost all students

The typical approach is to give some released time to faculty and to give limited support for programming and media production. It is unlikely, almost impossible, that good learning material will be developed this way.

Universities are too stuck in their current ways of doing things to be able to compete with well-developed material from "outside." Most university faculty and administrators do not appreciate the current problems of learning and so are not prepared for these future directions.

Those include insisting on a proctored final exam and reminding students of that exam “early, often, and broadly, so students are ever-conscious that they will be responsible for the material in an unaided environment.”

“So much of the learning that we do now is unsupervised, on our own,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, “that it’s crucial to be able to monitor that learning accurately; that is, to know how well we know what we know, so that we avoid fooling ourselves.”

“Studying something in the presence of an answer, whether it’s conscious or not, influences how you interpret the question,” Dr. Bjork said. “You don’t appreciate all of the other things that would have come to mind if the answer weren’t there. “Let’s say you’re studying capitals and you see that Australia’s is Canberra. O.K., that seems easy enough. But when the exam question appears, you think: ‘Uh oh, was it Sydney? Melbourne? Adelaide?’ ” That’s why some experts are leery of students’ increasing use of online sites like Cramster, Course Hero, Koofers and others that offer summaries, step-by-step problem solving and copies of previous exams. The extra help may provide a valuable supplement to a difficult or crowded course, but it could also leave students with a false sense of mastery. Even course outlines provided by a teacher, a textbook or other outside source can create a false sense of security, some research suggests. In one experiment, researchers found that participants studying a difficult chapter on the industrial uses of microbes remembered more when they were given a poor outline — which they had to rework to match the material — than a more accurate one.

a cognitive quality known as fluency, a measure of how easy a piece of information is to process.

On real tests, font size made no difference and practice paid off, the study found.

practice at retrieval has been shown to be more effective than merely spending more time studying the material without actively engaging in memory retrieval.

By doing so repeatedly, especially in varied contexts, the learner strengthens access to this information,

given minimal cues

two different effects. One is the "testing effect," in which intervening tests improves learning of concepts that are retrieved from memory

when intervening tests are spaced, two tests were more effective than a single test in improving long-term retention of material.

Compared to a cued-recall or recognition intervening test, a free-recall test produced better performance on a final test, regardless of the format of the final test.

Educational Applications

Align lectures, assignments and tests, so that important information will have to be remembered at different times

Have students retrieve this information in multiple ways by either varying the questions or context in which it is assessed:

During lectures, ask students questions to elicit responses that reflect understanding of previously introduced course material.

This serves the dual purpose of probing students' knowledge, so that misconceptions can be directly and immediately addressed in the lecture.

On homework assignments, have students retrieve key information from lectures and readings.

Chapter summaries, for instance, may include study questions that ask students to recall major points or conclusions to be drawn from the reading.

Encourage group studying in which students actively discuss course topics

test questions offer another opportunity for "practice at retrieval,"

Ideally tests should be cumulative and test items should probe for understanding of the material.