JISC e-Learning Models Desk Study Stage 2: Review of e-learning theories, frameworks and models (Terry Mayes & Sara de Freitas, 2004)

"This review is designed to inform practitioners, policy developers and other stakeholders who want to reflect more deeply upon their practice or gain a greater understanding about how theory and practice can be  mapped together. It is argued that reforming practice requires transformations of understanding of principles that are assumed – sometimes implicitly – in the practices. This review offers a framework for understanding where a particular implementation of e-learning is positioned in the complex current landscape of technology-enhanced teaching in UK HE/FE. It does so by attempting to offer a set of questions to be posed of an e-learning development – the answers to which reveal the underlying pedagogic and pragmatic assumptions.

There are really no models of e-learning per se – only e-enhancements of models of learning. That is to say, using technology to achieve better learning outcomes, or a more effective assessment of these outcomes, or a more cost-efficient way of bringing the learning environment to the learners. It is all the more important, when implementing elearning approaches, to be clear about the underlying assumptions. A model of e-learning
would need to demonstrate on what pedagogic principles the added value of the ‘e’ was operating. Where, for example, the ‘e’ allows remote learners to interact with each other and with the representations of the subject matter in a form that could simply not be achieved for those learners without the technology then we have a genuine example of added value. However, the role of the technology here is primarily to get remote learners into a position to learn as favourably as though they were campus-based, rather than offering a new teaching method. In such a case the enhancement should be seen as pragmatic rather than pedagogic, achieving cost effective access to learning, rather than a new way to achieve deep understanding of a concept. Even something that looks like a new paradigm for achieving learning outcomes, a peer-to-peer learner-matching tool, for example, may represent only an incremental advance in pedagogic terms, though its educational value may be enormous if it could be exploited through an educational infrastructure which integrated its use with quality assurance methods. It is important, therefore, not to take too narrow a view of what constitutes e-learning, or of where its main value might lie.

Nevertheless, the main goal of this paper is to examine the pedagogical frameworks for elearning, and to set out the underlying assumptions about learning that should provide a rationale for the technology."

Read the full paper.