Computer-based training

Definition

• Computer-Based Training (or Computer-Aided Instruction or Computer-Assisted Instruction) is a kind of Educational Technologies inspired by various behaviroist theories.

• An interactive instructional approach in which the computer, taking the place of an instructor, provides a series of stimuli to the student ranging from questions to be answered to choices or decisions to be made. The CBT then provides feedback based on the student's response.

Despite the fact that educational technologies now cover a variety of approaches such as microworlds or virtual communities, they still convey among many the caricature of these early days: a sequence of question-answer-feedback frames or a drill-and-practice environment. This approach may by useful for the acquisition of procedural skills, but the high granularity of instruction is inappropriate for higher level objectives. However, the original theories has been progressively influenced other theories: the constructivist ideas led to reduce granularity and include open problem solving situations; the cognitive science influence led to provide metacognitive tools instead of giving an immediate feedback.

History

Learning technologies have their roots in the behaviourist theories. As early as 1912, Thorndike wrote "If, by a miracle of mechanical ingenuity, a book could be so arranged that only to him who had done what was directed on page one would page two become visible, and so on, much that now requires personal instruction could be managed by print."(P. 165). The first mechanical teaching machine was developed by S. Pressey in 1927.

The success of behaviourist theories in psychology (Skinner) has their impact on pedagogical approaches, leading to Programmed Instruction (Crowder, 1964). The key principles were to make the learner active, to give immediate feedback, to decompose the learning process into a sequence of small steps (which augments the probability of positive reinforcement, and to individualize the learning activities (amount if time, number of difficulty of exercises). These principles were transferred from paper-based programme instruction to the first computer-based teaching programmes in the sixties.

Progressively, computer-based learning tools provided learners with more control of their activities. The mastery learning approach (Bloom, 1979) borrows the idea of a continuous control of effectiveness, but the notion of modules refers to a coarser grain in instructional sequence than the behaviourist notion of frames. In summary, nowadays, e-learning is much broader than its behaviourist origins but still relies on the concept of individualized instruction, It aims to construct a sequence of learning activities that builds upon the contributions of instructional science such as the effectiveness of pre-structuring and post-structuring activities, the salience of na�ve pre-representations, the benefits of multiple representations and even the enrichment of peer interactions.