| Chapter 2: | Background |
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Ebsco, WilsonWeb, and IUCAT
An in-depth search took me through multiple databases and knowledge resources, including EBSCO, WilsonWeb, IUCAT, and Google ™. EBSCO (the Elton B. Stephens Company) is an information resource search engine—available for free to members of the IU community—which provides access to thousands of journals and over 150 databases, including the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) database. Search capabilities range from simple to complex (including Boolean operators).
In addition to the author, title, date, and journal or book origination, search results usually include an abstract of and a hyperlink to the relevant texts returned from the search, as well as links to the IU library system to facilitate the location and retrieval of relevant material. In comparison to EBSCO, WilsonWeb is quite similar in function, purpose, and breadth of journal and database coverage. Additionally, WilsonWeb indicates whether an article is peer reviewed, and it tends to focus more exclusively on educational research literature and databases. IUCAT, IU’s electronic library catalog service, provides relevant and rapid results and access information to all materials in any of IU’s numerous libraries. EBSCO, WilsonWeb, and IUCAT constituted the core of relevant resources for finding instructional design theories in the scholarly literature.
The final electronic search engine that I used was Google. Google is one of the most popular and sophisticated online search engines available. The algorithms that it employs are designed to reveal the most relevant Web sites for whatever search criteria were used. The reason to make use of the Google database for this literature review was to cast a wider net of possible instructional design theories. Given the preponderance of distance education that takes place in online environments, it made deductive sense that designers of distance education would use the Web as a means of disseminating their instructional theories instead of employing traditional methods (such as submitting their theories to peer-reviewed journals or books). Nevertheless, only a small minority of articles and possible theories were identified and selected for review