Digital Learning Environments in Higher Education: A Literature Review of the Role of Individual vs. Social Settings for Measuring Learning Outcomes

Abstract

Research on digital learning environments has traditionally applied either an individual perspective or a social perspective to learning. Based on a literature review, we examined to what extent individual or social perspectives determined the learning outcome variables that researchers have used as measurements in existing studies. We analyzed prototypical approaches to operationalize learning settings (individual vs. social) published in peer-reviewed journals and identified their relation to several measures of learning outcomes. We rated n = 356 articles and included n = 246 articles in the final analysis. A total of 159 studies (64.6%) used an individual learning setting, while 87 studies (35.4%) used a social learning setting. As learning outcome measures, we observed self-reports, observable behavior, learning skills, elaboration, personal initiatives, digital activity, and social interactions. The two types of learning settings differed regarding the measurement of elaboration and social interactions. We discuss of the implications of our findings for future research and conclude that researchers should investigate further measures of learning outcomes in digital learning settings.communication and collaboration as well as for learning and knowledge exchange in an appropriate way to become competent and proficient members of a knowledge society. Second, digital learning environments promise to make learning and teaching more effective, for example, by increasing learners' motivation [14,21], adapting to students' prior knowledge [16], or providing the possibility for mobile and ubiquitous learning [22,23].However, the findings of existing studies on the impact of digital media on learning are ambiguous [24][25][26][27]. In general, influencing factors, such as teachers [28,29], prior knowledge [30,31], or the novelty of the particular digital setting [32] seem to have greater effects on learning outcomes than the use of digital media per se. One reason for marginal findings on the effects of digital media in these studies might be that they are highly heterogeneous with regard to measurements and the learning settings that they applied. Therefore, the study presented here summarizes common measurements of variables that capture learning outcomes in existing empirical studies. This contributes to finding a common language of researchers to describe effects by having a shared understanding of distinctive learning outcomes. We also argue that the particular theoretical perspective that researchers and practitioners take toward learning with digital media may have an impact on how they design learning environments, how they operationalize relevant variables, and how they measure learning outcomes [26]. Research on digital learning environments has traditionally applied two perspectives of examining and understanding how people learn [33]: A cognitive, individual-oriented perspective that focuses on individual cognition, and a social, community-oriented perspective that focuses on distributed cognition and col...

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