Learning theory and its application to e-learning

This chapter explores approaches to learning that we argue best reflect a constantly changing, dynamic environment as reflected in current thinking (Giddens, 1999; Beck, 1992; Castells, 1996). We acknowledge that there are many different schools of thought in terms of learning theories, but we will focus here on those we believe are most relevant and applicable to e-learning. This will include a discussion of the following: a critique of behaviourist approaches and their impact, advocacy of the application of experiential/reflective, social constructivist and socio-cultural approaches, and the argument that effective e-learning usually requires, or involves, high-quality educational discourse (Ravenscroft, 2004a) combined with an experiential and reflective approach (Conole et al., 2004; Mayes and de Freitas, 2004).