Week 2: The Three Main Learning Theories

1. It is important for E-learning designers to be able to describe theory-bases of their field because:

- Theories are the source of principles from which the prescription for learning design is drawn.-

- It helps them to make pedagogically informed decisions when faced with new and unfamiliar situations.

2. Drill and practice approaches are generally not suited for (1) Issue-based problems & (2) Design problems.

3. Cognitivism and Behaviourism as pedagogical approaches are not against the lone thinker, whereas Socioculturalism is.

4. In socialcultural pedagogy, the unit of analysis is the whole system of people and objects and organization.

5. The reasons for extrapolating a learning task on the Octahedron is to:

- approximate the pedagogical approach

- make informed decisions when mapping an appropriate tool to task.

6. Behaviourist pedagogy:

- Sees the mind as a black box

- Is based on behaviour modification via stimulus-response pairs, controlled and adaptive response

7. Socialculturalism focuses on:

- on the activity system, not the individual.

- the interaction between people and the tools that the culture provides to help form their own view of the world.

8. Cognitivism focuses on internal knowledge structures, processes and representations.