Distance Education Innovations and New Learning Environments: Com ...

Conclusion to the Introduction

Blended learning promises to be the next great educational trend (Hooper, 2001). But this invites important questions: What are the best strategies for designing instruction for blended learning formats? What instructional design theories are best suited to accomplish this task? The purpose of this study is to answer these questions.

What this study proposes to do is explore the existing instructional design theories for distance and blended learning and identify those that are most promising for a blended learning environment. Since blended learning is fundamentally based on distance education models, it is reasonable to draw upon distance education instructional design theories to apply in blended learning environments.

This study will be developed in the following way: This introduction has established the importance of blended learning and has set the context for the need for instructional design theories to guide instructional development for blended learning environments. In chapter 2, I will explain the distinction between learning theory and instructional design theory, I will argue for a set of criteria to guide an exploration of the existing instructional design theory literature, and then i will share the results of the literature search for the most promising blended and distance learning instructional design theories that can be applied to blended learning environments. Chapter 2 will conclude with the argument that pennsylvania state university’s IDE theory is the most comprehensive and promising instructional design theory. In chapter 3, i will offer a detailed review of a formative research methodology employed to improve upon the ide theory. In chapters 4 through 6 and appendices D and E, I will share and discuss the results of the formative research study on each of the five topic areas of the IDE theory. Appendix F is a summary of the revised ide theory based on the findings from this study. In the concluding chapter (chapter 7), I will offer summary conclusions and recommendations for future work with the ide theory in particular and instructional design theories for blended learning in general.