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

based on Google searches for the main reason that what can be found on the Web has not passed through the same peer-review protocols that are expected of academic literature. Thus, Google searching was used sparingly and with caution.

Scholarly Books

In addition to electronic information retrieval platforms, standard texts on instructional design theory were reviewed and their bibliographies culled for additional leads. These publications included Instructional-Design Theories and Models (volumes 1 and 2; Reigeluth, 1983, 1999b), Web-Based Instruction (Khan, 1997), and Web-Based Training (Khan, 2001b). This literature search resulted in hundreds of possible leads of instructional design theories for distance and blended learning environments.

Initial Findings from Search Results

Were any of these leads promising? As it turns out, many of the leads were dead ends. The titles and abstracts appeared promising enough, but quite often, once the texts themselves were perused, instead of laying out the principles, methods, and conditions for when to apply instructional strategies, many of the articles focused on the history of distance or blended learning, the strengths and weaknesses of distance and blended learning environments, trends in online and higher education, stumbling blocks traditional teachers are finding in attempting to design instruction for distance or blended environments, and process strategies for designing instruction (i.e., instead of offering prescriptive strategies that indicated when to use which method to achieve learning goals, the process or sequential steps one must follow to design instruction were described).

Though this information can be valuable, these topics do not constitute the critical features of instructional design theories and, therefore, cannot be included in the assessment of which instructional design theories for blended and distance contexts appear to be most viable. Based on the five criteria discussed and established previously, the remainder of this