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In an effort to define the scholarship performed by professors in academia as more than just "teaching versus research," Ernest L. Boyer, in his influential book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Carnegie Foundation, 1990), concluded that "the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions.

Randy Bass, director of the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP), described the SoTL projects initiated by the participants in VKP. Their central questions were "How did they know that their students were learning?" and "Did the students' learning promise to last?" He writes, "By asking these questions, many faculty discovered early on that what most interested—or eluded—them about their student's learning could not be answered simply by looking at regularly assigned course work."

Other learning theories that provide a foundation for CSCL include distributed cognition, problem-based learning, cognitive apprenticeship, and situated learning. Each of these learning theories focuses on the social aspect of learning and knowledge building. Each theory recognizes that learning and knowledge building involve inter-personal activities including conversation, argument, and negotiation.[4]

The theory suggests that learning is not a matter of accepting fixed facts, but is the dynamic, on-going, and evolving result of complex interactions primarily taking place within communities of people.

Collaboration theory proposes that technology in support of CSCL should provide new types of media that foster the building of collaborative knowing; facilitate the comparison of knowledge built by different types and sizes of groups; and help collaborative groups with the act of negotiating the knowledge they are building. Further, these technologies and designs should strive to remove the teacher as the bottleneck in the communication process. In other words, the teacher should not have to act as the conduit for communication between students or as the avenue by which information is dispensed. Finally, collaboration theory-influenced technologies will strive to increase the quantity and quality of learning moments via computer-simulated situations.[12]