Inquiry-Based Training Model and the Design of E-Learning Environments

Introduction The explosive growth of the Internet and the dramatic advances in the design and development of online technological tools in recent years have revolutionized the way students and teachers view technology in education. These technological advances have made it possible to produce educational materials and transmit them over the Web. In parallel to these technological advances, the field of instructional design has made phenomenal contributions to curriculum planning. A synergy of these two fields would enable educators to produce effective electronic educational materials. Unfortunately, a great majority of e-learning sites that use online tools lack appropriate theoretical foundations for curriculum content organization. These sites, all designed by highly intelligent and well-intentioned educators, use online technologies without any regard for application of pedagogy to the design of courses. The result is shallow curriculum where, at best, online technologies have been used to cover the tip of teaching and learning, leaving little time and effort for the students to delve into deeper understanding of curriculum and problem solving. There is a fundamental need for pedagogical approaches to design e-learning environments whose foundations are supported by effective theoretical framework. One of the most effective approaches to developing appropriate pedagogical models for the design of e-learning is to understand how cognitive development occurs naturally. Cognitive development theories attempt to explain cognitive activities that contribute to the learners' intellectual development and their capacity to solve problems. Once we understand how cognition develops, we can derive a pedagogical model from it and then design effective e-learning environments that are responsive to how students learn naturally. In what follows, Piaget's cognitive theory will be discussed and an inquiry- training model will be derived from it. Then I will describe the design of an e-learning environment that is based on Piaget's model and is adaptive to the cognitive needs of students. Cognitive Developmental Theory Piaget Piaget (1952) argued that children must continually reconstruct their own knowledge through a process of active reflection upon objects and events until they eventually achieve an adult perspective. To have a better appreciation of this process, it is essential to understand four other concepts that Piaget proposed. These concepts are schema, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium. Schema Piaget (1952) used the word schema to represent a mental structure that adapts to environmental patterns. In other words, schemata are intellectual structures, in terms of "neuron assemblies," that organize perceived events and group them according to common patterns. A number of researchers (Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Piaget, 1952) have posited that schemata are the building blocks of intellectual development. During cognitive development, children's schemata are constantly restructured as they encounter new patterns in their learning experiences. Schema is not limited to concepts, objects, data, and their relationships. There are also procedural schemata (Anderson & Pearson, 1984), which are the ways of processing information. For example, students who have acquired the basics of mathematics, such as adding, multiplying, dividing, and subtracting, have internalized the concept schemata about these mathematical operations. However, as the students grow, they gain new abilities to solve problems that are related to mathematical concepts. The ability to solve problems is a procedural schema. Both concept and procedural schemata are constantly restructured as new learning environments are introduced to the learner. Assimilation, Accommodation, and Equilibrium One of the most fundamental questions about schemata is how are they restructured when new data or patterns are discovered in the environment? …