1

e-Learning, Learning and Evaluation

1.1 Introduction
In this chapter we will provide a brief history of e-learning, emphasizing the
notion that using technology in an educational setting involves conscious
design decisions. These design decisions must involve considerations of how
learners learn, and so we will establish some key characteristics of learning
which, we believe, should be used to guide the design of technology-enhanced
learning (or ‘e-learning’) environments. We will explore the shorthand term
‘e-learning’ that will be used throughout the book by introducing the concept
of an e-learning life cycle. We will firmly establish our position, which is that
the focus needs to be on learning, not technology, and that there are a number
of ways in which a range of technologies can assist learners to learn.
Questions such as the following naturally arise when one designs any
learning environment for learners: “How do we know that the overall learning
environment or context – with its technology components, whatever they may
be – supports learning? Is this the best way to organize the learning environ-
ment?” These are evaluation questions and the central thrust of the book is
to provide pragmatic advice to teachers about how to answer such questions.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Good evaluation is systematic and scholarly; it involves data collection and

careful reflection on the implications of the data.
Overall, this book attempts to resolve some of the complexity of evaluation
of the effectiveness of e-learning, by unpacking the e-learning life cycle and the
types of evaluation and research that are appropriate at any given part of the life
cycle. It also presents practical advice in the form of an evaluation framework
and a scaffolded approach to the design of an e-learning research study.

1.2 What is e-Learning?

Computers have been used for education and training since the 1960s, and
increasingly since the 1990s. Large and increasing amounts of money have been
spent worldwide on the development of computer applications designed to
assist people to learn. In the 1990s, learning software tended to be authored

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 4 • Setting the Scene

as multimedia-rich, monolithic applications, addressing learning needs across

a period of time, often several weeks. Among many terms, such ‘courseware’
was called ‘interactive multimedia’, ‘computer-based learning’ (Phillips, 1997),
‘computer-facilitated learning’ (McNaught, Phillips, Rossiter & Winn, 2000)
and ‘interactive learning systems’ (Reeves & Hedberg, 2003). The authoring
software used at that time made it expensive to adapt material to other purposes
and to update it for changed information.
With the advent of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, it became
possible to develop courseware (hyperlinked web pages) which was much
more adaptable, and less expensive to create, but which lacked the educational
and multimedia richness of the earlier monolithic applications, primarily
because of difficulties in delivering large media files over the Internet, which
at that stage had very limited bandwidth. Shortly thereafter, the first learning-
management systems appeared on the market. These applications delivered web
pages to learners and provided online interactive tools that allowed learners to
interact with course materials, other learners and their teachers, but primarily
only using text.
Bandwidth increases in the early 2000s enabled effective interaction and
multimedia capabilities to be provided over the web. At the same time, the
‘learning object’ movement started to gain momentum, driven largely by the
American military’s requirement to provide reusable and adaptable training
content for its staff (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2003), independent of the
computer system being used.
A large number of terms has been used to describe the range of these com-
puter applications over the last two decades. A current favourite is technology-
enhanced learning; however, while enhanced learning is the intention, it is not
always the practice and, in a book about evaluation, we have chosen to use the
more neutral term e-learning. While we will argue in Chapter 3 that there are
semantic nuances surrounding the term e-learning which make it problematic,
we will continue to use the term in this book, because it is a useful shorthand
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

and widely accepted. We choose to use, as one among many, the definition of
Littlejohn and Pegler (2007, p. 15): “the process of learning and teaching with
computers and other associated technologies, particularly through use of the
Internet”.
For several years, proponents of e-learning have used the term in a ‘one size
fits all’ fashion, despite its use in a range of contexts. We agree with Friesen
(2009, p. 4) that e-learning has “come to represent a useful shorthand for a
range of different orientations to … the use of technologies in education and
learning. Often the precise way that the term e-learning is used is dependent on
the author’s particular purposes or specific research agenda”. Because the term
is often used without explicating the underlying assumptions of the author,
understanding e-learning is hampered, leading to confusion on the part of
practitioners and policy-makers.

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 e-Learning, Learning and Evaluation • 5

e-Learning is primarily a branch of the discipline of education. However,

it also brings in influences from other fields, including computer engineering,
information technology, design and media studies. “It is inter disciplinary
in that it seeks to combine and explore the inter connections between new
and different approaches from different fields and specializations; it is multi
disciplinary in that it simultaneously tries to respect the multiplicity of
differences that can separate one research approach from another” (Friesen,
2009, p. 12). Its multidisciplinary nature and its rapid evolution have led to
individual researchers taking different approaches to evaluation and research,
derived from their individual contexts and often with little reflection on the
appropriateness of that approach to the task of evaluating e-learning.
An important factor underpinning the arguments presented in this book is
that e-learning results from a design activity, where the outcome of the design
activity is an e-learning artefact. We take a broad view of the interpretation of
artefact to mean both tools developed using information and communication
technologies (ICTs) and tasks designed through these tools (see section 1.5,
p. 9 for further discussion on this). Research into designed artefacts has an
extra element not present when researching natural phenomena – that is,
whether the designed artefact functions as it was designed, or can be improved.
This element of improvement is not present in traditional science research into
natural phenomena, but is present in artificial sciences such as engineering,
architecture, computer science, and e-learning. These ideas will be explored
further in section 6.3, p. 87.
Indeed, in this book, we will emphasize evaluation of the effectiveness of a
designed and constructed e-learning environment, purposefully including one
or more artefacts. Such an environment might perhaps be used in a number of
different contexts.

1.3 Key Characteristics of Learning

In recent years, a consensus has emerged about the type of learning
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

environment that is likely to support learners to develop thinking skills such as

critical thinking and problem solving in order to become knowledge workers.
Such learning environments are the design outcome of a largely constructivist
pedagogical philosophy, adoption of a deep approach to learning and a
learner-centred approach to teaching, and outcomes-centred subject design
(Phillips, 2005b). It is not the intention of this section to provide a comprehen-
sive summary of learning theories; what we would like to provide are some
key principles about learning that will be used progressively in the book to
anchor our comments about designing and evaluating effective learning
experiences.
More specific advice is provided by a report from the National Research
Council in the United States of America (USA) into how people learn
(Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 1999, 2000). Among the key findings of this

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 6 • Setting the Scene

comprehensive review of research, several themes stand out as having most

relevance to tertiary education.
An important goal of tertiary education is for novices to become experts
in particular discipline areas. Bransford and colleagues distinguished a key
difference between novices and experts, which is that experts have in-depth
and organized content knowledge. This enables them to see relationships and
patterns between pieces of information, and also to retrieve important parts
of their knowledge relatively easily. In essence, an expert has a well-organized,
personal knowledge network.
This finding has important implications for universities. For tertiary learners
to become experts, they need to attain a deep, organized and contextualized
understanding of their discipline – and the learning environment needs to
support this. It is much easier to develop a knowledge network if knowledge
is organized by fundamental principles, as this enables learners to categorize
and interrelate areas of understanding in ways that make sense to them.
A further factor noted by Bransford and colleagues is that for learning to be
effective, it needs to be transferable to other contexts. To know ‘about’ some-
thing is not sufficient; one needs to know how to use knowledge in new situa-
tions that arise. So, learners need to see knowledge not as a fixed commodity,
but rather as something to be extended and utilized. In addition, learners are
most successful when they see themselves as being active agents in the process
of gaining and using knowledge.
These characteristics closely match those of ‘deep approaches to learning’
reported in the tertiary learning literature (Biggs, 1999; Gibbs, 1992; Ramsden,
1988, 1992). Learners who adopt a deep approach to learning are interested in
the topic and actively try to understand key concepts. Once these key concepts
are understood, an attempt is made to link together the concepts to make a
coherent whole. Then new knowledge can be related to previous knowledge
and to personal experiences, and thus integrated into a personal knowledge
network.
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The ‘approaches to learning’ research has identified several key principles

about how teachers should design and teach to increase the likelihood that
learners adopt a deep approach to learning. Three key ideas are as follows:

1. Transmission approaches lead to surface learning.

2. Depth of learning is determined by the nature of the learning tasks.
3. Surface and deep approaches are reactions to the teaching environment.

However, the situation is more complex and the motivation of individual

learners is a critical factor. Many readers may remember boring, didactic
learning environments where they were, nevertheless, engaged by the topic
and adopted a deep approach to learning; they may also remember interactive
learning activities that did not engage them, perhaps because of conflicting

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 e-Learning, Learning and Evaluation • 7

demands on their attention. Teasing out how best to design for learning is
always complex and involves a degree of compromise (Goodyear, 2009).
Perhaps the most fundamental principle is that the modern university teacher
needs to design flexible learning experiences that support diverse groups of
learners as they learn how to learn.
Well-designed learning tasks become an important precursor for effective
learning to take place. A learning activity is “an interaction between a learner
and an environment (optionally involving other learners, practitioners,
resources, tools and services) to achieve a planned learning outcome. Under this
definition, task, content and context are fundamentally inseparable” (Beetham,
2004). We will also distinguish between learning tasks and learning activities,
according to Goodyear’s (2009) insightful definition: “Tasks are what teachers
set. Activities are what students actually do” (p. 13).
However, while the interrelatedness and holistic nature of this description
of learning tasks and learning activities is important to bear in mind, some
analysis is needed in order to be able to suggest principles and strategies to
teachers about how to decide whether learning tasks are well designed or not in
any particular learning context.
Learning tasks are usually planned in terms of outcomes or objectives.
Allan contended that there are “fundamental conceptual differences between
outcome-led design and the traditional university approach which emphasizes
input and process” (Allan, 1996, p. 104). The modern university teacher needs
to design effective learning tasks, and to “facilitate their productive use by the
student” (Laurillard, 2002b, p. 24). This argument leads us to think of learning
as having three components: the learning environment designed for learners to
use; the learning processes used by students (how they learn); and the learning
outcomes that students can demonstrate (what they learn).
These ideas are discussed further in Chapter 3, where a conceptual model
is developed which characterizes learning in terms of the interactions between
learners, teachers and the learning environment, learning processes and
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learning outcomes. These ideas are fundamental to the structure of this book.

1.4 Evaluating Learning and e-Learning

Evaluation is a term that is often used imprecisely, with different meanings
in different contexts. This section seeks to unpack the various meanings of
‘evaluation’ in an educational context, and clarify the way that we interpret the
term in this book, as well as setting the scope of what is covered in this book.
There are numerous ways that the term ‘evaluation’ is used in higher
education. There is also a cultural element to definitions of ‘evaluation’. In
education textbooks originating in the USA, ‘evaluation’ is used in the sense of
making judgements about assessable learner work. In this book, we follow the
United Kingdom (UK) convention, describing the process whereby teachers set
specific tasks to judge the extent to which learners can demonstrate learning

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 8 • Setting the Scene

outcomes as ‘assessment’ and the term ‘evaluation’, in the sense of making

judgements about how effective the design of the learning environment
is for supporting learning. As this book is on e-learning evaluation, we will
concentrate on learning environments involving e-learning artefacts (discussed
further in section 1.5 on the following page).
The previous section has indicated the importance of well-designed learning
tasks to engage learners in productive learning processes. The e-learning
artefacts that we design act as tools which facilitate learning activities, which
learners can use in developing their own understandings (Von Brevern,
2004).
The history of e-learning over decades is littered with examples of products
promoted as ends in themselves which would revolutionize education.
However, when technologies are viewed as tools, the fallacy in this argument
is revealed. Maslow (1970, cited in Jensen and Kiley, 2005) “is credited with
the notion that if the only tool people have is a hammer, they tend to see and
respond to everything as if it were a nail”, an analogy also used by Reeves
and Hedberg (2003, p. 35). While few people would claim that it is sensible
for a tradesperson to use just one tool, this occurs relatively frequently with
educational technology.
We argue in this book that e-learning evaluation should focus on holistically
evaluating learning environments, rather than just evaluating the technologies
which contribute to the environment. While there is still an element of
evaluating the tools, e-learning evaluation is increasingly about how well these
tools are used to facilitate an effective learning environment. In the developed
world, at least, ICT use has become embedded throughout education.
In the 1990s, technical issues were a major component of evaluating
e-learning. Authoring tools were immature, hardware was slow when handling
multimedia elements, screen sizes were small, and Internet connectivity was
slow and intermittent. People were also grappling with how best to apply these
technologies to learning situations. However, over the last decade, technological
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

issues have reduced in importance as the tools have matured. New tools largely
build on the underlying multimedia and networking capabilities developed over
the last two decades, and combine features of, or link between, existing tools.
We do acknowledge that new technological tools are continually evolving, and
there is an element of technical evaluation and research of these tools; however,
the thrust of this book is not on technology per se but on making informed
decisions about the design of learning environments.
Since the approach we promote in this book focuses on holistically
evaluating the way a student learns in a given environment – which may use
one or more technological tools – many aspects of our approach could also
be applied in a technology-free environment. In other words, many of the
approaches developed in this book in an e-learning context could be applied to
other educational innovations.

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 e-Learning, Learning and Evaluation • 9

1.4.1 Other Instances of Evaluation and Research into e-Learning

There are some instances of evaluation which will not be covered in this book.
An institution might want to evaluate the roll-out of a strategic initiative –
for example, the implementation of an e-learning strategic plan – to see if it was
worth the money expended and if it achieved its goals. This is an evaluation of
a program, and we are not interested in this per se, although some elements of
program evaluation are used to set the scene in Chapter 4.
Selection decisions, at an institutional or individual level, can also be
informed by evaluation. At an institutional level, an evaluation might be
carried out to select the most appropriate e-learning system to implement, for
example, an e-portfolio system. Individually, an academic might use evaluation
to select the most appropriate of several published educational resources for
the given teaching context, for example, a textbook or a physics simulation
learning object.
In addition, evaluation might be used in terms of evaluating teaching
quality, for example, implemented through the surveys of learner satisfaction
carried out at many institutions. Survey results can be aggregated to provide
institutional indicators of quality, and they can also be used to affirm or
improve individual practice, but they are beyond the scope of this book.
Also beyond the scope of this book, apart from passing mention in Chapter
11, are evaluations of the institutionalization and sustainability of e-learning
innovations as they are implemented on a broad scale, and also the impact that
evaluation data might have on institutional e-learning policy.
We also recognize that there are different aspects of research into e-learning,
some of which are beyond the scope of this book. Conole and Oliver (2007a)
and Friesen (2009) recognized the complexity of this emerging multi- and
interdisciplinary field, and identified four distinct types of e-learning research:
pedagogical, organizational, technical and socio-cultural. Our interest is
mainly pedagogical, with a brief foray into organizational matters in Chapter
11. There is also a hard, computer-science aspect to e-learning research, with
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

technical work on emerging approaches and specifications. At the same time,

communications and culture researchers shine a postmodern lens on how
technology facilitates or hinders human communication and collaboration.
In this book, we are pragmatically interested in the effectiveness of e-learning,
and we will discuss this in detail in subsequent chapters. However, before we do
that, we need to clarify what we mean by e-learning artefacts and the e-learning
life cycle.

1.5 Types of e-Learning Artefacts

In section 1.2, we introduced the idea of e-learning artefacts, designed instances
of technology which can be used as tools to facilitate learning. This section
takes that discussion a little further.

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 10 • Setting the Scene

e-Learning artefacts have had various forms over the last two (or more)
decades. This section outlines some generic types of e-learning artefacts
which will be used to illustrate discussion throughout this book. The specific
characteristics of each of the generic types lead to variations in the forms of
evaluation carried out.
One concept we have used in developing this distinction is in the scale at
which the artefact is designed, using the distinction between macro-, meso-
and micro-levels of educational design, where the timeframe of use is weeks
or months, days or weeks, and minutes or hours, respectively (Goodyear, 2009;
Jones, Dirckinck-Holmfeld & Lindström, 2006).

1.5.1 Interactive Learning Systems

As outlined earlier, early e-learning artefacts tended to be monolithic
applications which provided content, interaction and navigation within the
same product, often delivered on CD-Rom. We will call these sorts of artefacts
interactive learning systems. Early web-based systems also tended to incorporate
content and navigation within a self-contained product, and we characterize
these as interactive learning systems as well. Interactive learning systems are
still developed and used, but, increasingly, content is sourced from a database
rather than being hard-coded. However, these systems are arguably less
prevalent than other types of e-learning artefacts. Interactive learning systems
tend to be designed for use by individuals (and sometimes small groups) for
largely independent learning, where learners interact with the computer and
resources on the computer. Interactive learning systems correspond to a meso-
level of educational design, typically being used over several weeks to facilitate
learning on a particular topic.
Educational games are one particular example of interactive learning
systems where there are good theoretical frameworks (e.g. Amory, 2007) and
a strong research community. We will not explore games per se, and just note
in passing that the frameworks and methods advocated in this book apply very
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well to games environments.

1.5.2 Generic Learning Tools

A second type of e-learning artefact arose with the development of generic
learning tools, which can be defined as generic artefacts made up of a set of
component tools to enable the management of content and navigation between
pages of content. While interactive learning systems are learning environ-
ments in themselves, generic learning tools facilitate the design of learning
environments. A learning environment might incorporate a number of tools
which enable learners to interact with the system (e.g. using online quizzes),
and to interact with each other through a range of communication tools.
Commercial and open-source learning-management systems (also called
virtual learning environments in the UK) are currently the most widespread

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 e-Learning, Learning and Evaluation • 11

examples of generic learning tools. However, other tools with similar characteris-
tics are maturing or emerging, including learning-design/activity-management
systems, e-portfolio systems, blogging engines and other Web 2.0 systems.
Generic learning tools tend to support the integration of a range of learning
tasks, and tend to reflect the nature of face-to-face learning and teaching
activities, where learners interact with online resources, their teachers and
other learners.
Generic learning tools correspond to a macro-level of educational design,
typically being used over several months to facilitate learning in a unit of
study over a semester. They tend to be used in blended learning environments
(Littlejohn & Pegler, 2007), mixing online and face-to-face study.

1.5.3 Learning Objects

The third type of e-learning artefact distinguished here is the learning object.
While there is no commonly agreed definition of learning object – see, for
example, Edwards, Rai, Phillips and Fung (2007) – they are generally small, self-
contained artefacts, designed to address a specific learning objective, usually a
single lesson about a particular concept. They are, therefore, at the micro-level
of educational design, tending to be associated with a single learning activity.
Much has been written about learning objects in the first years of the
21st century (e.g. Chapters 7–9 of Conole & Oliver, 2007b; Lockyer, Bennett,
Agostinho & Harper, 2009). A driver for the development of learning objects as
small, self-contained modules was the difficulty in adapting interactive learning
systems for new purposes (repurposing). This hampered the reusability of
expensive resources in other contexts. The thinking was that small modules
addressing single concepts could be developed that could then be reassembled
for use in a variety of contexts.
Learning-object repositories have been developed to facilitate the sharing
and reuse of learning objects. Some of these repositories have been established
with the explicit aim of widening access to educational resources; the Open
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

University’s OpenLearn site (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) and the Massa-

chusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare site (http://ocw.mit.edu/
index.htm) are well-known examples of open educational resource sites. While
the term ‘open educational resource’ has become popular, we will retain the
more general term, learning object. Both the Multimedia Educational Resource
for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT; http://www.merlot.org) and the
Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE; http://www.dlese.org)
repositories have associated user communities that appear to support growth
and re-use. However, many repositories have been unsuccessful, for reasons
identified in McNaught (2007) and O’Reilly, Lefoe, Philip and Parrish (2010).
Learning objects can be aggregated together into interactive learning
systems, or integrated with other learning activities in learning environments
facilitated through generic learning tools.

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 12 • Setting the Scene

1.6 The e-Learning Artefact Life Cycle

e-Learning is a design field (Reeves, 2006a), and e-learning artefacts need
to be designed and developed. The development of e-learning artefacts is a
complex, multidisciplinary process, proceeding through multiple design,
development and evaluation cycles. The e-learning design and project-
management literature (Duncan, 1996; England & Finney, 1999; Howell, 1992;
Phillips, 1997) decomposes the development process into a series of steps. One
characterization of the development cycle consists of a number of phases:

• analysing the requirements;

• specifying the design;
• development;
• implementation.

At each phase evaluation can lead to revisiting an earlier stage. At some stage
in the development cycle, an artefact is deemed to be suitable for widespread
use and it is implemented and then maintained through further cycles of
development.
However, e-learning evaluation and research can commence at various stages
of the e-learning artefact life cycle, with three generic cases. The e-learning
artefact may:

• exist only in conceptual form and need to be developed from scratch,

with evaluation at each stage;
• have been sourced from a repository, but it is unclear how well it functions
in a new context and what modifications may be needed (repurposing);
• have been used in a given context, but it is unclear how well it functions
as designed, and there is little rigorous evidence of its effectiveness.

In any case, an e-learning artefact needs to be embedded into a learning

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environment which encompasses the needs of the learner and the desired
learning outcomes. Developing an interactive learning system, or a learning
object, may have a more technical focus than developing a learning environ-
ment from a generic learning tool. This is because the former two involve
developing or repurposing an e-learning artefact, while the use of a generic
learning tool focuses attention more explicitly on the design of learning
activities. This will be discussed further in Chapter 8.

1.7 Summary
This introductory chapter has provided a broad overview of issues surrounding
the evaluation of the effectiveness of e-learning environments. Our primary
concern is with learning and our focus is on gathering and interpreting evidence
that might assist practitioners and researchers to understand how a range of

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 e-Learning, Learning and Evaluation • 13

technologies can be used in constructing effective learning environments. We

have discussed various uses of the term e-learning (often in the context of trying
to innovate in some aspect of teaching and learning), and described three types
of e-learning artefacts: interactive learning systems; generic learning tools; and
learning objects. Finally, we have highlighted the cyclical nature of e-learning
development and evaluation.
In the next chapter we will explore a pragmatic overview of the evaluation
process that we hope will act as a referential framework for the more theoretical
and detailed chapters that follow in Part II.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Phillips, R., McNaught, C., & Kennedy, G. (2011). Evaluating e-learning : Guiding research and practice. ProQuest Ebook Central
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