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Theory has both been celebrated and condemned in educational practice and research. Many proponents have argued that theory allows—even forces—us to see the “big picture” and makes it possible for us to view our practice and our research from a broader perspective than that envisioned from the murky trenches of our practice. This broader perspective helps us to make connections with the work of others, facilitates coherent frameworks and deeper understanding of our actions, and perhaps most importantly allows us to transfer the experience gained in one context to new experiences and contexts. Critics of theory (Wilson, 1999) have argued that too strict an adherence to any particular theoretical viewpoint often filters our perceptions and blinds us to important lessons of reality.

Wilson (1997) has described three functions of a good educational theory. First, it helps us to envision new worlds.

Second, a good theory helps us to make things. We need theories of online learning that help us to invest our time and limited resources most effectively.

Third, Wilson argues that a good theory keeps us honest. Good theory builds upon what is already known, and helps us to interpret and plan for the unknown. It also forces us to look beyond day-to-day contingencies and to ensure that our knowledge and practice of online learning is robust, considered, and ever expanding.

online learning is a subset of learning in general; thus, we can expect issues relevant to how adults learn generally to be relevant to how they learn in an online context.

effective learning is learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered

Learner Centered

Learner-centered learning, according to Bransford et al., includes awareness of the unique cognitive structures and understandings that the learners bring to the learning context. Thus, a teacher makes efforts to gain an understanding of students' pre-existing knowledge, including any misconceptions that the learner starts with in their construction of new knowledge. Further, the learning environment respects and accommodates the particular cultural attributes, especially the language and particular forms of expression, that the learner uses to interpret and build knowledge.

Knowledge Centered

Effective learning does not happen in a content vacuum. McPeck (1990) and other theorists of critical thinking have argued that teaching generalized thinking skills and techniques is useless outside of a particular knowledge domain in which they can be grounded. Similarly, Bransford et al. argue that effective learning is both defined and bounded by the epistemology, language, and context of disciplinary thought.

Each discipline or field of study contains a world view that provides often unique ways of understanding and talking about knowledge. Students need opportunities to experience this discourse, as well as the knowledge structures that undergraduate teaching affords. They also need opportunities to reflect upon their own thinking: automacy is a useful and necessary skill for expert thinking, but without reflective capacity, it greatly limits one's ability to transfer knowledge to an unfamiliar context or to develop new knowledge structures.

Assessment Centered

The third perspective on learning environments presented by Bransford et al. is the necessity for effective learning environments to be assessment centered. In making this assertion, they do not give unqualified support for summative assessments (especially those supposedly used for national or provincial accountability), but rather look to formative evaluation that serves to motivate, inform, and provide feedback to both learners and teachers

Understanding what is most usefully rather than what is most easily assessed is a challenge for the designers of online learning.

Baxter, Elder, and Glaser (1996) found that competent students should be able to provide coherent explanations, generate plans for problem solution, implement solution strategies, and monitor and adjust their activities.

the enhanced communications capacity of online learning and the focus of most adult online learning in the real world of work provide opportunities to create assessment activities that are project and workplace based, that are constructed collaboratively, that benefit from peer review, and that are infused with both the opportunity and the requirement for self-assessment.

A danger of assessment-centered learning systems is the potential increase in the workload demanded of busy online learning teachers.

Thus, the challenge of online learning is to provide high quantity and quality of assessment while maintaining student interest and commitment.

Community Centered

The community-centered lens allows us to include the critical social component of learning in our online learning designs. Here we find Vygotsky's (1978) popular concepts of social cognition to be relevant as we consider how students can work together in an online learning context to create new knowledge collaboratively. These ideas have been expanded in Lipman's (1991) community of inquiry and Wenger's (2001) ideas of community of practice to show how members of a learning community both support and challenge each other, leading to effective and relevant knowledge construction. Wilson (2001) has described participants in online communities as having a shared sense of belonging, trust, expectation of learning, and commitment to participate and to contribute to the community.

In short, it may be more challenging than we think to create and sustain these communities, and the differences—linked to a lack of placedness and synchronicity, that is, mutual presence in time and place—may be more fundamental than the mere absence of body language and social presence.

These potential barriers argue for a theory of online learning that accommodates, but does not prescribe, any particular boundaries of time and place, and that allows for appropriate substitution of independent and community-centered learning. To this requirement, we add the need for a theory of e-learning that is learning centered, provides a wide variety of authentic assessment opportunities, and is grounded in existing knowledge contexts.

Affordances of the Net

Online learning, as a subset of all distance education, has always been concerned with providing access to educational experience that is at least more flexible in time and in space than campus-based education.

Much of the early work on the instructional use of the Internet (Harasim, 1989; Feenberg, 1989) assumed that asynchronous text-based interaction defined the medium.

The Web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental schema and to the subsequent development of mental structures (Jonassen, 1992). Further, the capacity for students to create their own learning paths through content that is formatted with hypertext links is congruent with constructivist instructional design theory that stresses individual discovery and construction of knowledge (Jonassen, 1991).

Education is not only about access to content, however. The greatest affordance of the Web for educational use is the profound and multifaceted increase in communication and interaction capability that it provides.

Defining and Valuing Interaction in Online Learning

I will here simply accept Wagner's (1994) definition of interaction as “reciprocal events that require at least two objects and two actions. Interactions occur when these objects and events mutually influence one another” (p. 8).

Interaction (or interactivity) serves a variety of functions in the educational transaction. Sims (1999) has listed these functions as allowing for learner control, facilitating program adaptation based on learner input, allowing various forms of participation and communication, and acting as an aid to meaningful learning. In addition, interactivity is fundamental to creation of the learning communities espoused by Lipman (1991), Wenger (2001), and other influential educational theorists who focus on the critical role of community in learning. Finally, the value of another person's perspective, usually gained through interaction, is a key learning component in constructivist learning theories (Jonassen, 1991), and in inducing mindfulness in learners (Langer, 1989).

As long ago as 1916, John Dewey referred to interaction as the defining component of the educational process that occurs when the student transforms the inert information passed to them from another, and constructs it into knowledge with personal application and value (Dewey, 1916).

It can be seen that, generally, the higher and richer the form of communication, the more restrictions it places on independence.

Student-student Interaction

Modern constructivist theorists stress the value of peer-to-peer interaction in investigating and developing multiple perspectives.

Student-teacher Interaction

Student-content Interaction

Eklund (1995) lists some potential advantages of such approaches, noting that they allow instructors to •   provide an on line or intelligent help facility, if a user is modeled and their path is traced through the information space; •   use an adaptive interface based on several stereotypical user classes to modify the environment to suit individual users; and •   provide adaptive advice, and model the learner's use of the environment (including navigational use, answers to questions, and help requested) to make intelligent suggestions about a preferred individualized path through the knowledge base. To these advantages must be added the capacity for immediate feedback, not only for formal learning guidance, but also for just-in-time learning assistance through job aids and other performance support tools.

Teacher-teacher Interaction

Teacher-content Interaction

Content-content Interaction

Content-content interaction is a newly developing mode of educational interaction in which content is programmed to interact with other automated information sources, so as to refresh itself constantly, and to acquire new capabilities. For example, a weather tutorial might take its data from current meteorological servers, creating a learning context that is up-to-date and relevant to the learner's context.

A Model of E-learning

The model illustrates the two major human actors, learners and teachers, and their interactions with each other and with content. Learners can of course interact directly with content that they find in multiple formats, and especially on the Web; however, many choose to have their learning sequenced, directed, and evaluated with the assistance of a teacher. This interaction can take place within a community of inquiry, using a variety of Net-based synchronous and asynchronous activities (video, audio, computer conferencing, chats, or virtual world interaction). These environments are particularly rich, and allow for the learning of social skills, the collaborative learning of content, and the development of personal relationships among participants. However, the community binds learners in time, forcing regular sessions or at least group-paced learning. Community models are also, generally, more expensive, as they suffer from an inability to scale to large numbers of learners. The second model of learning (on the right) illustrates the structured learning tools associated with independent learning. Common tools used in this mode include computer-assisted tutorials, drills, and simulations.

A key decision factor is based on the nature of the learning that is prescribed. Marc Prensky (2000) argues that different learning outcomes are best learned through particular types of learning activities. Prensky asks not, “How do students learn?” but more specifically, “How do they learn what?

Prensky (2000, p. 56) postulates that, in general, we all learn: •   behaviors through imitation, feedback, and practice; •   creativity through playing; •   facts through association, drill, memory, and questions; •   judgment through reviewing cases, asking questions, making choices, and receiving feedback and coaching; •   language through imitation, practice, and immersion; •   observation through viewing examples and receiving feedback; •   procedures through imitation and practice; •   processes through system analysis, deconstruction, and practice; •   systems through discovering principles and undertaking graduated tasks; •   reasoning through puzzles, problems, and examples; •   skills (physical or mental) through imitation, feedback, continuous practice, and increasing challenge; •   speeches or performance roles through memorization, practice, and coaching; •   theories through logic, explanation, and questioning.

Online Learning and the Semantic Web

Campus-based education systems are constructed around physical buildings that afford meeting and lecture spaces for teachers and groups of students. The Web provides nearly ubiquitous access to quantities of content that are many orders of magnitude larger than those provided in any other medium.

The Web offers a host of very powerful affordances to educators.

Thus, I conclude this chapter with an overview of a theory of online learning interaction that suggests that the various forms of student interaction can be substituted for each other, depending on costs, content, learning objectives, convenience, technology, and available time. The substitutions do not result in decreases in the quality of the learning that results. More formally: Sufficient levels of deep and meaningful learning can be developed, as long as one of the three forms of interaction (student-teacher; student-student; student-content) is at very high levels. The other two may be offered at minimal levels or even eliminated without degrading the educational experience. (Anderson, 2002)

The challenge for teachers and course developers working in an online learning context is to construct a learning environment that is simultaneously learning centered, content centered, community centered, and assessment centered.

Table 2-1 illustrates how the affordances of these emerging technologies can be directed so as to create the environment that is most supportive of “how people learn.”

However, we can expect that online learning, like all forms of quality learning, will be knowledge, community, assessment, and learner centered.

The task of the online course designer and teacher is to choose, adapt, and perfect (through feedback, assessment, and reflection) educational activities that maximize the affordances of the Web. In doing so, they create learning-, knowledge-, assessment-, and community-centered educational experiences that result in high levels of learning by all participants.

Toward a Theory of Online Learning

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.