Davidson-Shiver and Rasmussen (2006) purport that there are several key concepts of behaviorism that have been applied to the educational environment and that you may find important in designing and implementing a distance education course or program. Please note that these are a few selected concepts; there are many more.

Practice - Research demonstrates that repetition via practice can strengthen learning. Providing learners with opportunities practice after the presentation of material or reading may allow learners to strengthen a specific skill. In the e-learning environment, an instructor may use Second life, a virtual world, to deliver a lecture and engage his or her students in a role-play. To read about an example of this, take a virtual trip to Innovate to Read Educational Opportunities for Clinical Counseling Simulations in Second Life.

Modeling - Modeling is defined as a demonstration of the desired behavior or response. For example, a course designer may encourage an instructor to provide instructions for an assignment and then post exemplarily work of previous students as examples. Another example is an instructor modeling the writing of desired discussion board responses when interacting on discussion forum.

Reinforcement - Theorists purport that learners learn or exhibit desired behaviors when provided with positive or negative reinforcement. For example, in the e-learning environment, an e-mail from the instructor providing results and explanation of those results on an assignment may serve as a positive reinforcement. In the mobile environment a reinforcing text could be sent. (Note: For this to be a positive reinforcement the learner must view the e-mail as pleasant. When planning reinforcement, learners' characteristics should be taken into consideration).

Active Learning - Behaviorist purport that learners should be active in that they should respond to stimulus in order for learning to occur. In the e-learning or mobile environment, instructors may require students to require students to answer questions in a discussion forum or via text messaging. The instructor may require learners to share documents in a collaborative workspace such as a wiki or other collaborative workspace. The purpose of this is so that instructors may observe students understanding of the material; thus, making this different than active learning described in constructivism.