Learning relationships from theory to design

Abstract

Over the last five years we have seen a very significant increase in the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools, colleges and university. For example in 1998, there were over 195 accredited US universities offering a thousand or more distance learning courses (Philips and Yager, 1998). By no means were all of these new courses associated with educational innovation. The speed and ease of implementation of Webbased approaches, in particular, is resulting in design by imitation of current courses and methods, with a real lack of innovation or utilization of the power inherent in technologybased learning. Although matters are improving (see for example Brown, 1999), part of the reason for this failure to innovate is, we argue, because of the large gap between theory and practice.