Open Learning Environments: Foundations, Methods, and Models

Michael Hannafin, Susan Land & Kevin Oliver

Goals and preconditions. This chapter provides a theory for situations where divergent thinking and multiple perspectives are valued over a single "correct" perspective. It is appropriate for heuristics-based learning and for exploring fuzzy, ill-defined, and ill-structured problems.

Values. Some of the values upon which this theory is based include:

• personal inquiry,
• divergent thinking and multiple perspectives,
• self-directed learning and learner autonomy with metacognitive support,
• mediating learning through individual experience and personal theories,
• hands-on, concrete experiences involving realistic, relevant problems,
• providing tools and resources to aid the learner's efforts at learning.

Methods. These are the major methods this theory offers:

• Enabling contexts (to establish the perspectives taken in the environment)
  1. Externally-imposed contexts (specifies specific problems for the learner)
  2. Externally-induced contexts (presents problem context, learner generates the problems to be addressed)
  3. Individually-generated contexts (learner generates both the context and problems)
  
  
• Resources (to provide the domain of available information sources)
  1. Static (do not change through use)
  2. Dynamic (do change through use)
  
  
• Tools (to provide the basic means for manipulating information)
  (are not specific methods per se; are used in various ways to represent and manipulate concepts under study)
  1. Processing tools (to support learners' cognitive processing)
     1. Seeking tools (to locate and filter needed resources)
     2. Collecting tools (to gather resources)
     3. Organizing tools (to represent relationships among ideas)
     4. Integrating tools (to link new with existing knowledge)
     5. Generating tools (to create new things or artifacts to think with)
  2. Manipulation tools (to test the validity of, or to explore, beliefs and theories)
  3. Communication tools (to communicate among learners, teachers, and experts)
     1. Synchronous communication tools (to support real-time interaction)
     2. Asynchronous communication tools (to support time-shifted communication)
  
  
• Scaffolds (to guide and support learning efforts)
  1. Domain-specific versus generic scaffolds
  2. Conceptual scaffolding (guidance on what to consider)
  3. Metacognitive scaffolding (guidance on how to think about the problem under study)
  4. Procedural scaffolding (guidance on how to utilize resources and tools)
  5. Strategic scaffolding (guidance on approaches to solving the problem)

While this theory does offer some guidelines (conditions under which different methods should be used), much of it is presented here as a taxonomy of methods, where the practitioner needs to figure out when to use each.

Major contributions. Addresses a difficult kind of learning with a wide variety of methods and a great deal of flexibility.