This paper presents Richard E. Mayer’s personal overview and analysis of research developments in online learning over the past 30 years, showing the ways that online learning contributes to the science of learning (how people learn), the science of instruction (how to help people learn), and the science of assessment (how to determine whether they have learned). Mayer is a distinguished professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara and is widely cited and broadly recognized as a leading voice working at the intersection of cognition, instruction, and technology. Mayer’s underlying assumption in all of his work is closely tied to Clark’s famous assertion that learning is caused by instructional method not instructional media. He contends that advances in instructional technology have outpaced advances in the instructional sciences needed to determine how best to use them. In this short paper, he provides a broad overview of the evolution of research in online learning and learning psychology over the last thirty years and concludes that ongoing research in learning science should focus on three things: 1) identifying and maximizing the benefits exclusive to online media, 2) finding better objective instruments to measure the cognitive processes in effect while learners are using the media, rather than relying on the learners to give accurate assessments of their own cognitive processes, and 3) identifying the conditions under which online learning methods are most effective.
I found this to be an excellent article in that Mayer clearly laid out how prevalent teaching methods since the turn of the century reflected the learning media and determined the kinds of assessment used to measure learning. When behaviorism was prevalent in the early decades of the 20th century, learning was motivated by reward and punishment, leading to drill and practice methods. Cognitivism was the prevailing theory in the 1940s-1960s, and during that time optimal learning consisted of information acquisition—leading to lectures to convey information and assessments to determine a student’s degree of fact acquisition via memorization. By the 1970s and 1980s, constructivism came along, redefining learning as the ways that learners synthesize new information against what they already know. The latter led to learners being asked to problem-solve within real-life authentic settings.
One of the newer prevalent theories overlays constructivism—a generative model in which the student learns with understanding not just by filing the new information in relation to the old, but also by actively constructing meaning in the process. The second newer model that has arisen from online learning is cognitive load theory, which insists that instruction must be highly streamlined, and instructional designers/educators must “reduce extraneous cognitive load caused by inappropriate instructional procedures.” Cognitive load theory led to a variety of “best practices” that still guide instructional design—segmenting (chunking), pretraining (defining terms first), and modality (the ideal ways to use text in combination with audiovisual material). Mayer outlines how he has worked from both of these theories in his research on multimedia learning, and suggests that the most promising areas for further research in online learning include: affect, motivation, the effect of emotional design, the power of self-efficacy, and the way that students’ metacognition of their learning can affect how well they learn.
In terms of the science of instruction, one of the more interesting and applicable discoveries of his and others’ recent research is that students can in fact actively learn while using passive media, and that cognitive activity is not dependent on behavioral activity. In other words, yes, you can learn by doing, but you can also learn by reading, watching, and other seemingly passive activities. In my own work and research, it will be helpful to look more closely at Mayer’s enormous body of research and apply his discoveries about how people learn best with passive media to the work we do in designing instruction at an online arts institution. This can work hand in hand with research to identify sources of artistic motivation in online instruction and use this to build research-proven solutions for teaching the arts online.
Susan Gedutis Lindsay 