The Emergent Learning Model

This chapter synthesises the earlier work on modelling learning and tries to create a design toolkit for anyone who wants to design for learning. However, the conceptual starting point for this chapter is the desire expressed in the EU Bologna Process to integrate “informal,” “non-formal,” and “formal” learning. The authors believe that the process the EU carried out, which led to the Horizon 2020 funding programme, was mistaken. The critical dimension of this lies in whether one examines these three dimensions of learning by starting with the existing formal structures of education or if one starts with the largely unexamined processes of learning. Education assumes that learning is an automatic by-product, an epiphenomenon, of the education system and so does not need to be defined separately. As has been seen in the chapters based on an ethnographic study of learning in digital environments and on learner-modelling (Chapters 1 and 2), learning has not been sufficiently discussed or described in much academic literature focused on education.