Designing for online learning environments: Towards and ePedagogy development

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.