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. The intent of this chapter is to look at learning theory generally, and then focus on those attributes of the online learning context that allow us to develop deeper and more useful theories of online learning.

Wilson (1997) has described three functions of a good educational theory. First, it helps us to envision new worlds. Few of us need help envisioning new worlds in the midst of the hype and exuberance of online learning proponents that flood the popular press, but we do need theory to help us envision how education can best take advantage of the enhanced communication, information retrieval, and management capability provided by the Net. It is all too easy to consider new innovations in a “horseless carriage” manner, and to attempt to develop new actions based on old adaptations to obsolete contexts.

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. There are many opportunities, but always a critical shortage of resources, a situation which demands that we maximize the efficiency of our development and delivery efforts. This book contains a number of chapters with particular recommendations and suggestions for online course development and teaching. It is hoped that this chapter provides a theoretical “big picture” that will help make sense of these specific recommendations.

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.

This chapter begins with a general assessment of how people learn that is based on Bransford, Brown, and Cocking’s (1999) work. It then assesses the unique characteristics of the Web that enable it to enhance these generalized learning contexts; that is, the Web’s “affordances.” The chapter next discusses the six forms of interaction and their critical role in engaging and supporting both learners and teachers. It then presents a model of e-learning, a first step toward a theory in which the two predominant forms of elearning—the collaborative and independent study modes—are presented, with a brief discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each. The chapter ends with a discussion of the emerging tools of the “Semantic Web” and the way they will affect future developments of the theory and practice of online learning

As many theorists have argued (Garrison & Shale, 1990), and as practitioners experience for themselves, 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. In an insightful book on the “new science of learning,” Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) provide evidence that effective learning environments are framed within the convergence of four overlapping lenses. They argue that effective learning is learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered. Discussing each of these lenses helps us to define learning in a general sense, before we apply this analytical framework to the unique characteristics of online learning.

A learner-centered context is not one in which the whims and peculiarities of each individual learner are uniquely catered to. In fact, we must be careful to recognize that learner-centered contexts must also meet the needs of the teacher, of the institution, of the larger society that provides support for the student and the institution, and often of a group or class of students. For this reason, I have argued elsewhere (Anderson, in press) that this attribute might more accurately be labeled “learning centered,” than “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. Learner-centered activities make extensive use of diagnostic tools and activities, so that these pre-existing knowledge structures are made visible to both the teacher and the student.

Online learning can present challenges to educators, because the tools and opportunities for discovering students’ preconceptions and cultural perspectives are often limited by bandwidth constraints that limit the view of body language and paralinguistic clues. Some researchers have argued that these restrictions negatively affect the efficacy of communication (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976). Others have argued that the unique characteristics that define online learning (most commonly asynchronous textbased interaction) can actually lead to enhanced or hyper communications (Walther, 1996).

We have found evidence of significant social presence in computer conferencing contexts (Rourke, Anderson, Archer, & Garrison, 2002; Rourke & Anderson, 2002). Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the challenges of assessing student preconditions and cultural prerequisites are often more difficult in an online learning context, because teachers are less able to interact transparently with students—especially in the critical early stages of the formation of a learning community. It is for this reason that experienced online learning teachers make time at the commencement of their learning interactions to provide incentive and opportunity for students to share their understandings, their culture, and unique aspects of themselves. This sharing can be done formally, through electronically administered surveys and questionnaires, but is often accomplished more effectively by virtual icebreakers, and by the provision of an opportunity for students to introduce themselves and to express any issues or concerns to the teacher and the class.

The online learning environment is also a unique cultural context in itself. Benedikt (1992) has argued that cyberspace “has a geography, a physics, a nature and a rule of human law” (p. 123). Many students will be new to this context, but increasingly, students will come to online learning with preconceptions gathered from both formal and informal experience in virtual environments. They will exercise their mastery of communication norms and tools, some of which will not be appropriate to an educational online context. Researchers have attempted to quantify this proficiency and comfort with online environments through the use of survey instruments that measure a learner’s internet efficacy (Eastin & LaRose, 2000). They have argued that it is not Internet skill alone that determines competency; rather, a strong sense of Internet efficacy allows users to adapt effectively to the requirements of working in this environment. Thus, the effective online learning teacher is constantly probing for learner comfort and competence with the intervening technology, and providing safe environments for them to increase their sense of Internet efficacy. Learner-centered online-learning contexts thus are sensitive to the cultural overlay acquired in offline contexts, and the ways in which it interacts with the Web’s affordances.

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.

In comparison to campus-based learning, online learning neither advantages nor disadvantages knowledge-centered learning. As I discuss below, the Net provides expanded opportunities for students to plunge ever deeper into knowledge resources, thus affording a near limitless means for students to grow their knowledge, to find their own way around the knowledge of the discipline, and to benefit from its expression in thousands of formats and contexts. However, this provision of resources can be overwhelming, and the skillful e-teacher needs to provide the “big picture” scaffolding on which students can grow their own knowledge and discipline-centered discoveries.

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.

Quality online learning provides many opportunities for assessment: not only opportunities that involve the teacher, but also ones that exploit the influence and expertise of peers, others that use simple and complex machine algorithms to assess student production, and, perhaps most importantly, those that encourage learners to assess their own learning reflectively. Understanding what is most usefully rather than what is most easily assessed is a challenge for the designers of online learning. Developments in cognitive learning theories and their application to assessment design are helping us to devise assessments that are aligned with the subject content, and that assess cognitive processes as well as end results. For example, 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. I am continually disappointed when reviewing assessments that my own children are subjected to in school and at university to note the very high percentage of recall questions and the lack of assessment strategies that effectively measure the four sets of competencies identified by Baxter et al.

Can we do any better in online learning? The diminution of opportunities for immediate interaction between learners and teachers might reduce opportunities for process assessment; however, 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. Strategies that are designed to provide formative and summative assessment with minimal direct impact on teacher workload are urgently needed. There is a growing list of tools that provide such assessment without increased teacher participation, including • the use of online computer-marked assessments that extend beyond quizzes to simulation exercises, virtual labs, and other automated assessments of active student learning;

• collaborative learning environments that students create to document and assess their own learning in virtual groups; • mechanisms, such as online automated tutors, that support and scaffold students’ evaluation of their own work and that of their peers; • student agents who facilitate and monitor peer activities to allow students to assess and aid each other informally; • the use of sophisticated software tools, such as latent semantic analysis (LSA) or neural networks, to machine-score even complicated materials, such as students’ essays. Thus, the challenge of online learning is to provide high quantity and quality of assessment while maintaining student interest and commitment. These goals are often best achieved through the development of a learning community, to which we turn next.

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

Although there are many online learning researchers who celebrate the capacity to create learning communities at a distance (Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff, 1995), there are also those who note problems associated with lack of attention and participation (Mason & Hart, 1997), economic restraints (Annand, 1999), and an in-built resistance among many faculty and institutions to the threatening competition from virtual learning environments (Jaffee, 1998). Ethnographic studies of the Net (Hine, 2000) illustrate how the lack of “placedness” and the complications of anonymity attenuate different components of community when the community is located in virtual space. 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.

I have been struck by the wide variation in the expectations of learners about participation in a community of learners. Traditionally, distance education has attracted students who value the freedom from constraints of time and place that is provided by independent modes of distance education. Contrary to popular belief, the major motivation for enrollment in distance education is not physical access, but rather, temporal freedom to move through a course of studies at a pace of the student’s choice. Participation in a community of learners almost inevitably places constraints on this independence, even when the pressure of synchronous connection is eliminated by use of asynchronous communications tools. The demands of a learning-centered context might at times force us to modify the prescriptive participation in communities of learning, even though we might have evidence that such participation will further advance knowledge creation and attention. The flexibility of virtual communities allows more universal participation, but a single environment that responds to all students does not exist; thus, the need for variations that accommodate the diverse needs of learners and teachers at different stages of their life cycles.

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.

Effective educational theory must address the affordances and the limitations of the context for which it is designed (Norman, 1999). The World Wide Web is a multifaceted technology that provides a large set of communication and information management tools that can be harnessed for effective education provision. It also suffers from a set of constraints that are briefly outlined in this section.

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 campusbased education. Access to the Web is now nearly ubiquitous in developed countries. The Wall Street Journal of February 4, 2002, reported that 54% of U.S. adults use the Web on a regular basis, and 90% of 15-17 years olds are regular Web users. This high percentage of users would probably include well over 90% of those citizens interested in taking a formal education course. Access to the Web is primarily through home or workplace machines, but placements in public libraries and Internet cafes and connections through personal wireless devices are such that access poses no problems for the vast majority of citizens of developed countries. I have also been surprised by the availability of access in developing countries, as exemplified by free use of the Net in McDonald’s restaurants in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the numerous Internet cafés, in most Chinese cities. Access is still problematic for those with a variety of physical handicaps; however, in comparison with books or video media, the Web provides much greater quality and quantity of access to nearly all citizens, with or without physical disabilities

Access is increasing, not only to technology, but also to an evergrowing body of content. The number of scholarly journals (see http://www.e-journals.org), educational objects (see http://www. merlot.org/Home.po), educational discussion lists (see http://www .kovacs.com/directory), courses (see http://courses.telecampus.edu/ subjects/index.cfm), and general references to millions of pages of commercial, educational, and cultural content (see http://www .google.com) is large and increasing at an exponential rate. Thus, online learning theory must acknowledge the change from an era of shortage and restrictions in content to one in which content resources are so large that filtering and reducing choice is as important as providing sufficient content.

The Web is quickly changing from a context defined by textbased content and interactions to one in which all forms of media are supported. 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. Techniques were developed to maximize interaction using this relatively lean medium. We are now entering an era where streaming video, video and audio conferencing, and virtual worlds are readily available for educational use. Thus, online learning theory needs to help educators to decide which of the many technological options is best suited for their application.

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).

Finally, the growing ease with which content can be updated and revised (both manually and through use of autonomous agent technology) is making online learning content much more responsive and potentially more current than content developed for other media. The explosion of Web “blogs” (Notess, 2002) and userfriendly course-content management systems, built into Web delivery systems such as WebCT or Blackboard, is creating an environment in which teachers and learners can very create and update their course content without the aid of programmers or designers. Naturally, this ease of creation and revision leads to potential for error and lessthan-professional-standard output; however, educators who are anxious to retain control of their educational content and context welcome this openness and freedom.

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. The next section discusses this affordance in greater detail.