Towards a Collaborative Hypermedia Educational Framework

To date, no comprehensive, theoretical framework exists for providing instructional environments for distance learning. With this paper we hope to lay out a Collaborative Hypermedia Educational Framework (CHEF) for instruction at university level that addresses this gap. The CHEF provides a fundamental philosophy or vantage point for thinking about how best to serve distance learning students, instructors, and courseware developers in a principled manner. The CHEF embodies three fundamental concepts: collaboration, hypertext and multimedia. The premise of the proposed framework is that these three concepts should underlie most facets of learning and instruction, and support the implementation of many educational and learning theories.