What is your personal definition of learning? How do your ideas about learning compare with the definition of learning presented in this text?

The answer to this question, and especially the text that your question aludes to, can be found on the lumenlearning website, and it says this: that all beings have a three-step process of learning that explains how an organism develops the capacities to behave and act accordingly, depending on the conditions around it. These three steps are: classical conditioning (Pavlovian conditioning), operant conditioning, and finally, observation. All organisms go through these steps to learn how to behave and act in an environment.

Classical conditioning is simply the way that an organism is taught how to respond by association. As an organism experiences its environment, it observes different events and learns how to associate cause and consequence, or responses, to stimuli. During operant conditioning, an organism also associates and also learns that producing a behavior brings either reward, or punishment, and observation is how an organism learns to act through observation and imitation of others.

To me, learning is a much more complex process, in which, all the experiences taken in by an organism, the environment, and also genetics, play all a role together in the way this organism processes all and acquires knowledge and produces responses to that knowledge. But I agree with these theories that all organisms go through steps. You see it with babies. They first learn to act through what they observe, but as intelligent and sapient beings, they too can learn to produce behavior outside of what was observed, or conditioned in them. So, in animals and other beings the three steps mentioned above might work, but not necessarily in humans.