"Learning occurs when students generate knowledge about from within, not receive information from outside…

Learning is an active process."

- William Winn, 1998

Most of us would agree that information memorized for the test may not be really learned. Information memorized this way may be forgotten quickly after a test. Testing alone will not determine if a student has received the necessary knowledge to do a job. The Web presents knowledge that is not necessarily learning so we need to make sure course materials suit the nature of the Web.

The newly acquired knowledge needs to be applied through practice, and as many experts remind us, in the context in which the skill is performed. What happens during this process is that the students build mental models of the world from the information they have received and how they have processed this information. These "internal representations of knowledge" support the cognitive theories of learning that new knowledge links with existing knowledge to build on.

We know that learning has occurred when a student can demonstrate the skill and can even better when he/she can transfer the knowledge to a different task. For this reason, performance-based tasks need to be more apart of Web activities. In a current nutrition course, the instructor sends the students to a local grocery student to review nutritional labels and builds the assignment around this task. You may want to think of a field experience for a student in your course and have them relate the assignment to a real purpose.

© Independent Learning, CU-Boulder, 2001