Creating Effective Web-Based Learning Environments: Relevant Research and Practice

Web-based learning environments are a great asset only if they are designed well and used as intended. The urgency to create courses in response to the growing demand for online learning has resulted in a hurried push to drop PowerPoint notes into Web-based course management systems (WBCMSs), devise an electronic quiz, put together a few discussion questions, and call it a course. My mentor once quipped that "good learners will learn, in spite of our bad learning environments." Nevertheless, instructors cannot expect that all students will have the skills to navigate online courses and learn within them, particularly if they are only digital reincarnations of poor face-to-face learning environments and practices.