A Constructivist Approach to Web Course Design: A Review of the Literature

I 1996, the National Survey of Desktop Computing in Higher Education reported that assisting faculty in course design and integrating it into the curriculum as the single most important issue facing institutions of higher learning (Green, 1996). This was five years ago, and it is still an issue today. In fact, the report issued in October of 2001 reiterates this same concern. It is still the single most important issue facing campuses across the nation and will be for the next two or three years (Green, 2001). To assist faculty in coping with this dilemma, Instructional Technology Centers (ITCs) have emerged as integral departments on most college campuses (Carr-Chellman & Duchastel, 2000, p.233). Employees in these departments are scrambling to help faculty keep current with the rapidly changing technology. Design pedagogy is a major concern (Dick, 1996; Mioduser, Nachmias, Lahav, & Oren, 2000). However, within the literature, there are limited empirical studies geared toward analyzing effective pedagogy for online courses. Faculty members’ reluctance to have their courses scrutinized could be attributed to this. Most likely, it is because teaching methodology has been thoroughly analyzed in traditional classrooms, and the hypothesis is that the same pedagogy should exist in web courses. Nonetheless, a recent study at Brevard College in North Carolina accentuates that lecturing is still the most often utilized method of learning (Newman & Scurry, 2001, p. 7). This passive learning technique is not aligned with current pedagogy. Ross and Schulz (1999), in their article A Constructivist Approach to Web Course Design: A Review of the Literature