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13 E-learning theories
Associative/ Behaviourist approaches
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Design principles
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Looking for observable behaviour
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Explicitly mentioning course outcomes
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Behavioural objectives
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Ability to test achievement of learning outcomes
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Instructional Systems Design (ISD)
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Decomposing learning into small chunks
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Routines of organised activity
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Learning hierarchies (controversial!)
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Sequencing learning materials with increasing complexity
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Giving direct feedback on learning
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Individualized learning trajectories
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Cognitive psychology (constructivism)
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Types of memory (sensory – short term – long term)
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Maximize sensations: strategic screen layout
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Research on memory, perception, reasoning, concept formation.
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Maximize sensations: well-paced information
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Learning is active
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Maximize sensations: highlighting main elements
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Learning is individual (knowledge construction)
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Relate difficulty level to cognitive level of learner: providing links to easier and more advanced resources
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Use of comparative advance organizers
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Use of conceptual models
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Importance of prior knowledge structures
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Pre-instructional & prerequisite questions
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Experimentation toward discovery of broad principles
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Promote deep processing
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Use of information maps zooming in/ out
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Cognitive Apprenticeship (Brown et al, 1989)
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Interactive environments for construction of understanding
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Metacognition (reflection, self-regulation)
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Relate to real-life (apply, analyse, synthesize)
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Learning styles (controversial!)
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Address various learning styles
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Cognitive styles
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Let students prepare a journal
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Dual coding theory
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Use both visual information and text
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Motivate learners (ARCS model)
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Use techniques to catch attention, explain relevance, build confidence and increase satisfaction
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Situated learning (constructivism)
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Personal knowledge construction
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Personal meaning to learning
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Situated learning: motivation
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Relate to real life (relevance)
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Holistic/ Systemic approaches
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Conduct research on internet
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Build confidence with learners
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Identity development
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Use of first-hand information (not filtered by instructor)
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Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger)
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Collaborative activities
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Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky)
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Fostering the growth of learning communities
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Learning as act of participation
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Legitimate (peripheral) practice, apprenticeships
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Lifelong learning
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Authentic learning and assessment tasks
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Connectivism
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Information explosion
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Digital literacies
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Learning in network environment
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Keep up-to-date in field
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Knowledge base
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Multi-channel learning
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Distributed learning
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Build diversity, openness in learning (different opinions), autonomy
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Personal Learning Environment
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self-directed learning, just-in-time |
Constructivism – Jonassen et al 1999
Social Constructions – Vygotsky 1986
Activity Theory – Engeström et al 1999
Experiational Learning – Kolb 1984
Instructional Design – Gagné et al 2004
Networked and collaborative work – McConnell 2000
Learning Design Jochems et al 2004
Primary: presenting information
Secondary: active learning and feedback
Tertiary: dialogue and new learning.
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- Module 3 – Learning and Technology Theories Reflection (natalieedit202.wordpress.com)
- Learning Theory (downes.ca)
- Learning Theory – What are the established learning theories? (miracletrain2013.wordpress.com)
- Learning Theories and Technology (daniellegroten.wordpress.com)
- Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age (gamedynamics.wordpress.com)
- Social Constructivism (s4323697.wordpress.com)
13 Learning Theories in a SimpleMinds mind map
Fig. 1. Learning Theories. Click on this and you can grab the original in a variety of sizes from the Picasa Web Album where it resides. (Created using SimpleMinds APP)
In an effort to impose some logic these are now grouped and various links also made. The reality might be take a large bowl of water then drip into these 12 coloured inks. The reality of how we learn is complex and will only be made the more so with fMRI imaging and advances in neuroscience.
My favourite Learning Theory here is one that Knud Illeris (2009) came up with – not learning at all, resistance too or defence learning. You just block it. That’s how I did 9 years of Latin and can decline how to love a table – I have no idea anymore what ‘ramabottom’ or some such means either. Ditto French as taught before secondary school and Chemistry – right or wrong, tick and box in a multiple choice each week. Still, for someone who couldn’t give a fig for either this approach got me through on a C grade. For French the ‘holistic’ approach worked a treat – French exchange, then back to hitch through France with some French guys who didn’t have a word of English, then got a job out there. Chemistry worked best with my Chemistry 7 set.
Activity Theory and Communities of Practice are surely in meltdown with the connectivity of Web 2.0?
The nodes and silos are too easily circumvented by each of us going directly to the source. ‘Community of Ideas’ works best for me.
Learning Theories
1) Neurophysiological – stimulus response, optmization of memory processes: Sylvester, 1995; Edelman, 1994; Jarvis, 1987.
2) Holistic – Illeris, 2009.
3) Behaviorist – Stimulus response pairs, Skinner, 1974.
4) Cognitive – Communication, how the brain receives, internalises and recalls information, problem solving, explanation, recombination, contrast, building upon information structures, focus on internal cognitive structures, models, methods and schemas, information processing, inferences.; Wenger, 1987; Hutchins, 1993; Anderson, 1983; Piaget, 1952.
5) Constructivist – Learners build their own mental structures, design orientated, assimilative learning (Illeris, 2009); task-orientated, cohort/collaborative group. Leonard, 2010): Vygotsky, 1934; Piaget, 1954; Bruner, 1993; Papert, 1980.
6) Transformative Learning – significant (Roger, 1951, 59); Transformative (Mezirow, 1994); Expansive (Engestrom, 1987); Transitional (Alheit, 1994).
7) Social – Socialization, a psychological perspective, imitation of norms, acquisition of membership, interpersonal relations (Bandura, 1977)
8) Communities of Practice – The focus is on participation and the role this plays to attract and retain new ‘members’; knowledge transfer is closely tied to the social situation where the knowledge is learned, (Learnard, 2010); shared, social and almost unintentional; legitimate peripheral participation (Lave, ); taking part in the practices of the community. A framework that considers learning in social terms. Lave & Wenger, 1991.
9) Communities of Interest –
10) Accommodative Learning – Illeris, 2007.
11) Activity Theories – Learners bridge the knowledge gap via the zone of proximal development, Wertsch, 1984. Historically constructed activities as entities. Thinking, reasoning and learning is a socially and culturally mediated phenomenon. Learnard, 2010. Engestrom, 1987; Vygotsky, 1934; Wertsch, 1984.
12) Organizational – How people in an organisation learn and how organisations learn. Organizational systems, structures and politics. Brown and Dugiod, 1995. Noaka and Takeuchi, 1991.
13) Resistance to/defence learning – Illeris, 2007
70,000 years ago we were getting something right in relation to learning and responding to circumstances and left Africa.
We have been learning in communities ever since.
Perhaps population pressures or stability permitted reading and our inexorable desire to innovate led to the printing press and more since besides. Meanwhile populations and civilizations grew and society required or permitted the development of formal learning.
For me all the learning theories are observations of human behaviour as individuals or in groups.
Open learning is if anything taking us back to learning on the fly, in more vibrant less formal communities online. A response to the necessity of educating 7 billion and solving many of the human created problems on this dot in space called Earth.
I rather think the theories come AFTER the event to philosophise over what is taking place – in a commercial and entrepreneurial world you get on with it.
Take virtual worlds – they are commercial gaming and entertainment environments which educators would like to use and as they use them explain, position and justify.
- All I want to know is, does it work?
- Is it affordable?
- Is it scaleable?
- Is it going anywhere?
- If not ditch it snd try something else.
Related articles
- Week 5: Mapping Learning Connections and Reflection (tlpsidt.wordpress.com)
- A Great Wheel of All The Learning Theories Teachers Need to Know about (educatorstechnology.com)
Timelines, theories and technologies
This is a learning dilemma that will become increasingly prevalent. You have a stinker of a complex mass of resources and cobbled together ideas to compile into some kind of order only to find that it has been done for you. This is an activity of how understandings of the process of learning has changed over time.
On of our tutors offers a helping hand:
Take your time reading this through and then consider how these historical changes might affect
- the development of educational technologies
- ethical considerations in e-learning research
- research in your own discipline.
There’s quite a lot in there. If you want to start just responding to one of the bullet points above, that’s fine.
When these modules are designed is proper consideration really given to the students? Who they are? There levels of commitment and understanding? For all the personas I’m familiar with I do wonder.
And that’s not even the start of it. We are then asked to look back at week 3 (a month ago), and look for relationships and connections between the narrative we create (above). Then, as if this isn’t enough we need to rope in last weeks ethical considerations, and while we’re at at put in the ‘wider political and social changes’.
Already we have, in my estimation (and this is my sixth postgraduate module and the fifth in the MAODE series) a good 16 hours work to do.
But there’s more:
‘Consider how the subject you studied for your undergraduate degree has changed over time’.
Post your answers in your tutor group forum and compare them with others.
Across the five groups I think, so far two, sometimes three people, have given this a go. Each could write a chapter in a book (one nearly has)
2 Hours have been allocated to the task.
I repeatedly find that whatever time is given as a suggested requirement for a week’s activities that you need to add 50%. So 14 hours becomes 21.
Like a junior solicitor I’ve been keeping tabs on how long everything takes – and this is someone who is by now, evidentially, digitally literate and familiar with the OU VLE. If you can find 21 hours great. If not then what? If you can handle getting behind or strategically leaving gaps that’s fine, but if you feel obliged to get you money’s worth and want to do it all then what? And of course life goes on around you: kids off school, elderly relations fall ill, the workload ebbs and flows, the car breaks down … your Internet connection becomes about as vibrant as a mangle and it snows a bit.
A simple guide to four complex learning theories
http://edudemic.com/2012/12/a-simple-guide-to-4-complex-learning-theories/
I came across this from edudemic and can’t think of anything clearer.
The discussion offers some further thoughts, deleting the word ‘traditional’ and replacing with classical.
The ifs and buts of the people associated with each of these and how absolute any of them can be, especially connectivism. However, I see connectivism not as the end of a chronological chain, but rather a loop that has people connected and learning in their family, extended family and community. And the one component that has not changed a jot? The way the human brain is constructed during foetal development and the unique person who then emerges into any of some hundreds of thousands of different circumstances and from way they may or may not develop ‘their full potential’. Though I hazard a guess that this will always remain impossible to achieve. 98 billion neurons take a lot of connecting. It starts at around 4 months after conception and only ends with death – death being after the vital physiological supports have collapsed and like the self-destructing tape in Mission Impossible ‘all is lost’.
The infographic runs to and 12 rows. This is the last row. The rest you ought to see for yourselves.
Copyright 2013 © Edudemic
Powered by coffee, and a love all things education technology.
Simplistically the technologies I can add across this chronology are:
Books – Learning by rote > Literacy (writing, paper) – but then the Oxbridge Tutorial goes back over 750 years and that was and still is ‘Constructivism’ before someone came along 700 years later and gave it a name.
I’m reminded of the aphorism from Philip Larkin, ‘Sex started in the Sixities’ – about the same time as constructive learning. As for ‘connectivism’ what happens in a market, what has happened at religious gathering for millennia? Why do clever people have to come along and say these things have never happened before? Connectivism = discussions. Perhaps we’d be better off NOT writing it down, by going and finding people. I spoke to a Consultant the other week who for all the technology and e-learning swears by the conference. And for how many millennia have ‘experts’ like-minds and the interested (and powerful/influential) had such opportunities to gather.
In 1999 my very first blog post was titled ‘what’s new about new media, not much’.
Whenever I read it I feel the sentiment is the same – as people we have not changed one jot. Just because everyone has a ‘university in their pocket’ – if they are some of the few hundred million out of the 7 billion on the planet who have a Smart Phone or iPad does not change the fundamentals of what we are and the connectedness of our brains.