Designing Online Learning Environments for Distance Learning

The design of an Online Learning Environment (OLE) and presentation of content in a distance educational programme is a major factor in success or failure of the learning programme. The role of instructional designers who design online learning environments for distance learning programmes has become demanding. In order to support instructional designers to do their work effectively, they are provided with instructional design guidelines. However, most of these guidelines are not specific nor easily applicable. Therefore, we were motivated to create sets of easy applicable instructional design guidelines. We selected an OLE which was already reported as successful in achieving learning effectiveness and student satisfaction. We gathered students’ experiences on using the OLE for their studies and analysed the data to find what design components of the OLE has led to the learner satisfaction, what design strategies used to design the learning content and design features of it led to the learning effectiveness and whether there was a relationship between students’ learning style preferences and students’ learning design preferences. The findings of the data analysis were presented as guidelines for instructional designers of online learning materials for novice online learners in distance learning programmes. on computer applications and information technology.
at UCSC, Sri Lanka