Instructional Support for Distance Education

Abstract

During the late ‘90s, distance education and e-learning were believed to be able to solve almost every problem associated with the further qualification of employees in organizations. Distance education was credited with saving costs for companies, by reducing time and expenses for traveling and with flexible time management. Consequently, many companies started programs for distance education. However, after this initial euphoria, several organizations experienced problems with their programs (e.g., Haben, 2002). The costs for distance education courses exploded, employees refused the new style of learning, and the general question arose as to the effectiveness of distance education (see, e.g., Bernard et al., 2004). Looking at the range of distance education courses at this time, one could see that they used a broad variety of technologies to deliver learning contents to the learners, for example, videos, Web pages, dedicate software for learning, Weblogs, wikis, collaboration tools, videoconferencing, chat, and discussion boards. However, in contrast to the variety of technologies available, the instructional design of these courses was elementary and traditional (see Ertl, Winkler, & Mandl, 2007). Many courses offered recorded classroom lectures and streamed them to participants, or they just presented texts or slides in the style of a book. Such courses experienced a lack in acceptance and thus several efforts of distance education failed because the instructional design of these courses was not able to take advantage of the innovative technologies.