Feedback is an essential aspect of the learning process, including e-Learning and it should come soon after work is submitted. Lack of feedback indicates to learners that the tutor has not read the work and therefore it isn’t important. This is particularly prevalent with online tutor assessment.

The most popular description of a learning process is the Kolb Learning Cycle. This describes how learners test and try out new skills. Kolb offers a constructivist approach to learning, that means the learner constructs new knowledge and skills in relation to existing ones. This is an important idea for those supporting learning.

You can’t do learning at people. They must be actively engaged in a series of activities to build the new knowledge and skills. Each new skill learned becomes a reference point for the next. These reference points are constantly challenged and/ or confirmed as new skills are acquired.

Feedback enables learners to modify new ideas and challenge old ones. It is a model that expects learners to get things wrong as part of the learning process and assumes that people will always seek meaning in the activities they undertake.

The Kolb model stresses the importance of recognising that individuals have preferred learning styles and that a one-fit-all teaching approach is not adequate. The learning styles in this model are:

• diverging
• assimilating
• converging
• accommodating

"Simply, people who have a clear learning style preference, for whatever reason, will tend to learn more effectively if learning is orientated according to their preference."

Look at the section in the Toolkit on Kolb's Learning Cycle