Educating a Multidisciplinary Human Services Workforce - Information Communication Technologies for Human Services Education and Delivery - page 9

a learner to develop the desired knowledge and
skills.

The Behavioral View of Learning was pro-
moted in the first part of the 20th Century by
behavioral psychology promoting a different
view, considering learning to be based on the
acquisition of mental associations. This view of
learning is about correct responses to questions
and instruction; providing small chunks of in-
formation followed by questions and corrective
feedback. In the process of making many small
correct responses, learners generally build large
chains of new knowledge. The behavioral view
is reflected in programmed instruction and many
traditional Instructional Design approaches that
emphasize bottom-up sequencing of instruction,
short lessons, and frequent reinforcement in the
form of feedback.
The Cognitive View of Learning has developed
in the last part of the 20th Century, when learning
was again re-conceptualized (McKay, 2008). This
time the emphasis was on the active processes
learners use to construct new knowledge. This
construction requires an integration of new in-
coming information from the environment with
existing knowledge in memory. In the cognitive
view, learning is about active construction of new
knowledge by interacting with new information,
while instruction is about promoting the psycho-
logical processes that mediate that construction.

approacHeS to teacHing
anD learning

The teaching style will necessarily influence
the learner's experience and type and level of
engagement with the course content. In educa-
tion today an “active approach” to learning is
generally preferred. It is argued in this chapter
that there is much to be gained from using a
variety of approaches that are carefully matched
to learner requirements. For instance it may be
appropriate to use a “didactic approach” when
providing new content and a more active ap-
proach when translating this information into
practice. This gives new meaning and depth to
the term “blended learning”; the term gener-
ally used to describe education that combines
face-to-face approaches with use of ICT tools.
Blended learning is thus extended to include the
combination of different approaches to learning
and the instructional/learning architectures that
support them. Accordingly, a blended approach
to teaching and learning occurs on two levels by
combining face-to-face delivery with ICT tools,
and different approaches to learning with appro-
priate instructional/learning architectures.
In the following classification of approaches to
teaching and learning by Clarke (2003), didactic
approaches are typified in the passive absorption
view of learning with more active approaches
portrayed in the behavioral and cognitive views
of learning.
The Absorption View of Learning requires
clarity about the difference between learning and
instruction. Learning in this view is about as-
similating information, while instruction is about
providing information to learners. Some call this
a transmission-view of teaching (Mayer, 2001).
Courses that rely on lectures or videotapes to
transmit information generally reflect this view.

learning arcHitectureS

Different learning architectures can be imple-
mented to support the various types of learning
experiences. Although the active construction of
knowledge is commonly accepted today as the
mechanism for learning that construction can be
fostered through four diverse instructional envi-
ronments (Clark, 2003). These are referred to as
the “four instructional architectures”: receptive,
directive, guided discovery and exploratory. Table
1 illustrates the learning architectures best suited
to each of the approaches to teaching and learning
presented in this chapter.