ruminators' ilk

Designing for E-Learning 

The author of this article is Mark Nichols, E-learning Specialist .Bible College of New Zealand.

Read the introduction:

Faculty are often too busy to seriously consider learning design. Rather than embracing its open-endedness and seeing the almost limitless potential for customising it to their own educational purposes, we often hear comments such as ‘Just show me how it looks and I’ll get on with it’, or ‘Do you have a sample that I could look at and use as a template?’ (There is a clear parallel with ‘Just give me what’s in the exam’!) It is all too easy to provide examples and templates, and so give the impression that instructional design for e-learning is simply about filling in blanks and copying exemplars. But instructional design and e-learning have too much potential and variety to even consider a Model-T Ford approach to development. Faculty also tend to think of writing courses rather than creating learning experiences. This e-primer aims to help you, as faculty, to think creatively about how to match what you would like students to learn with an enlightening learning experience. 

This e-primer provides a framework for deciding how you might apply instructional design and e-learning to any given educational context. The framework is relevant to all educational contexts, but the discussion assumes a tertiary education context in humanities, and a distance education or hybrid delivery model. I do not consider Web 2.0 technologies and techniques in depth here (for that discussion, see E-Primer 5, Extending Possibilities). 

I acquired this resource from Instructional Technology Forum,1 March 2008.

Recommended.

This is a 34-page PDF file.

Designing for E-Learning 

Creating Learning Materials for Open and Distance Learning 

This valuable resource, an introduction to instructional design,isavailable online for free.

I acquired this resource from Mark Nichols's article Designing for E-Learning. 

Creating Learning Materials for Open and Distance Learning

Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies

This report from the United States Department of Education concludes ““On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

This is a 93-page report.

Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies