Designing for online learning environments: Towards an ePedagogy development model

Higher education institutions are taking opportunities offered by the eLearning community to design and offer educational environments that accommodate various learners´ educational needs. Yet it appears to have been taken for granted that `technology enhanced learning´ has the potential to facilitate lifelong knowledge acquisition. Considerable time and effort has been expended by courseware designers to innovate emerging information communications technology (ICT) tools to enhance the technology-enabled learning experience. However, there are a limited number of research studies that specifically focus on investigating the interactive effects of the ePedagogical practice to improve instructional outcomes. This paper sets out to describe a doctoral research project that is underway to investigate such practices. We propose a conceptual framework that identifies the underlying knowledge domains that underpin this research; instructional design (ID); community culture; human-computer interaction (HCI); and cognitive psychology.